I am currently a second year Ph.D. student in economics at New York University. It took me a long time to figure out that I wanted to study economics. After graduating from the University of Chicago with a B.S. in math, I was everything from a teacher to a cook to a bike mechanic. I was motivated to study economics by a few basic questions I had about poverty and inequality such as how to alleviate them, for example. To be honest, I didn't really know what I was getting into. Luckily I'm enjoying it so far. However, I can not help feeling that many of the standard assumptions of neoclassical economics are suspect at the very least and I am interested in being exposed to other approaches. I joined the graduate forum at NYU because I saw it as great opportunity to learn from other disciplines and to force myself to think through economic ideas in untraditional ways. I feel that as economists continue to expand the broad range of topics that we consider fair game for analysis (everything from love and marriage to politics and psychology) and, we should remember that we have a lot to learn from those fields which are more traditionally associated with such topics.
My main interests in economics are game theory and experimental work because I think both are important tools for modeling decision making. The game theory that I have been introduced to so far provides a foundation for modeling interactions between completely rational agents. I am interested in experimental economics because it provides a forum for exploring the scope of actual observed behavior in a controlled setting. More specifically I am interested in fair division schemes, learning in games and the formation of social norms.