Never Too Late

Would you mind telling me a little bit about how you got to where you are today in terms of your career and where you are now?

 

Sure, so I went to Michigan as an undergraduate and majored in mathematics and was very involved in student politics and stuff. After graduating I was debating either taking a job in consulting or in finance but then decided to go get a PhD in mathematics because I got good offers there. Started graduate school in mathematics and it was all going totally fine and then the math market really sort of shifted for two reasons. One is the former Soviet Union fell apart so all these amazing mathematicians came over but sort of more importantly theoretical computer science and game theory both became these fields of studies that didn’t even exist when I was an undergrad. So this was the idea of using mathematics to understand strategic behavior or understand how we design and link computers and that sort of stuff. Both of those, especially the former, just seemed sort of more in line with what I was interested in, so then I switched and went to Northwestern because they had the best collection of game theorists and went there and got a PhD in game theory. Then from there, just became a professor. It wasn’t something I sort of anticipated doing and early on I was just doing basic things professors do, trying to write papers so I could get tenure, I was teaching at Cal Tech in Pasadena California which was great. Overtime I’ve kind of morphed a bit and started doing stuff that’s more applied. I think that’s been a fairly traditional route, you start out somewhat theoretical and you move into applied areas as you get older. 

 

 

Did you ever feel like at a point that someone really kind of inspired you to take that path or supported you being able to change from going into math to game theory?

 

So I think many times, as an undergrad I had professors here at Michigan who even though I wasn’t doing that well in mathematics convinced me that I should keep going on. My high school didn’t have calculus so I was taking math way beyond my abilities when I came in here and struggling and George Craney and some other people were just really good about saying, no no you have talent you should stick it out. Then, when I got to graduate school my advisor at Northwestern, Stan Reider, was really good at basically telling me I shouldn’t do what other people should do, I should pursue my own ideas and I think just did a really good job of just letting me seek out and find things that interested me as opposed to sort of I think following a path that would’ve perhaps would’ve led to more immediate success but wouldn’t have necessarily been stuff that I was as interested in. 

 

 

Okay that’s a good point. Can you explain a little bit about how feel towards what you’re doing today? Are you happy, is this what you wanted to be doing now?

 

So it’s funny, I’m obviously very happy. The thing is, it’s not, what I’m doing now isn’t something I could’ve anticipated, I didn’t event think it existed. Right, so I’m running the Center for Complex Systems here at Michigan that wasn’t even a field as late as when I got my PhD. I go out and give a lot of talks on the importance of diversity. It’s crazy. The set of places I go is fascinating, I was just at NASA, go to Federal Reserve Boards, places like Google, Yahoo. I’ve traveled throughout Europe giving talks on this, so it’s just been interesting I think that there was this appetite for this very theoretical work on diversity even though typically theoretical work never sort of leaves the academy for the most part. The sort of thing that people want to hear is the sort of stuff that makes it in the newspaper, tends to be more empirical, more experiments and so the fact that there’s been this appetite for this stuff on diversity has been a surprise. There’s other stuff, like this online course that I do. It’s again, those things didn’t even exist. So a lot of what I do, didn’t exist during the time when I was trying to decide what it is that I would want to do and so that’s been kind of funny. 

 

 

Yeah definitely. Did you ever feel like there was a time, along getting here, that things became too difficult or you felt that you had to make a choice or sacrifice to get to where you are?

 

I was a good student as an undergrad but I don’t think I really knew how to be a great student. I still don’t consider myself very scholarly in a lot of ways, certainly shows in my work I think. When I went to grad school at Wisconsin I started out, okay I’m going to be serious about this and then I got involved with helping the graduate students organize a union against the University and we won this giant union election and my heart still sort of wasn’t in it and then I thought about taking a job going to work at this game theory and mathematical economics was interesting to me and so I started at Northwestern. I think at that point, I just realized that I have to work really hard for a year and just see is this something that I really can do and want to do. I think it’s very easy to sort of not work that hard and do B+ work and be close and just say oh if I worked as hard as those people I could do as well as they do, but then at some point if you want to do as well as those people, you’ve got to work as hard as those people, so I think that was the big shift. I got to Northwestern and basically said, I’m going to do my work and I’m going to play basketball, so that I have an outlet, but then I’m not gunna go to movies, spend a lot of time at the concert scene in Chicago, just gunna do my work and play basketball and just be focused on those two things. 

 

 

Okay, that’s a good example. For all of the college seniors that are listening, do you happen to have any advice for people that are trying to make a decision of what they want to do with their future?

 

I think one thing that’s just important is acquiring lots of, especially in a place like Michigan, think about what are the sets of skills that I can acquire here that are going to be very hard to acquire. Learning technical skills is much easier in a social setting and learning whether it’s special statistics or math or chemistry, anything like how global warming really works as opposed to ya know newspaper accounts, anything that is at all technical. I think that this is the time to learn it because it’s just easier social setting, you need lots of time and I think on your own to think that later on you’re going to learn cost accounting, that’s just probably not going to happen. So I think that picking up those sorts of skills is super important. The other thing is that the people I know that have been successful have just continued to learn. It’s amazing how many times I’m out and you meet with people that whether they’re running a government agency, rising up in corporate America, started a nonprofit how much they just absolutely continue to learn and I think that especially smaller family sizes, parental pressure that sort of stuff there’s a tendency to think okay I want to, I have to say I’m fitting into one of these categories, I’m going to be a lawyer or I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to be a business consultant as opposed to taking a little bit of a longer view and saying okay what might I go do that I’m going to learn something or have some set of experiences that are going to enable me to then go on and so other things that I would like to do.

 

I think also thinking hard about what do you like to spend your time doing and you want to find a job where what you’re doing most of the time is stuff you actually want to be doing. So if you don’t like reading, don’t be a lawyer. So there is some professions, like medical school and law school, one thing about them is that there is a lot once you’re in there that you can do. I think that thinking hard about are you acquiring tools that are useful and are you acquiring tools that enable you to do things you would like to do is hugely important. You see so many people that wish they, some of my friends when they reach age 50 say I wish I would’ve learned this, I wish I were able to do this. In some cases, believe it or not it’s things like accounting, it’s just like you know if you’re in corporate America working and not knowing accounting can cost you right? Or not knowing basic finance. You just think, I should’ve done that, or I have other friends who just basically said, okay fine. One friend of mine who has been hugely successful, he went back and got a masters degree in economics because he was editor of the Daily as an undergrad and went out and was doing really well and got a job at the Wall Street Journal and just recognized okay I’ve got this great job but if I wanna, like you’re not going to be part of the Wall Street Journal if you don’t know quite a bit economics, so you go back and get a masters, not so you have the credentials but so you understand the economics, it’s nothing about the credentials. The other thing, especially in today’s society there’s so much credentialing going on, like I’ve got this degree, I’ve got that degree, I think it’s just much more important that you just know stuff then actually have some sort of certificate or something.