Economics: The Art of Making Choices

When Jivyaa Vaidya ’23 was studying for her economics classes at Grinnell, sometimes she had to pause and take a deep breath. 

It wasn’t that she was intimidated by the academic work. It was quite the opposite. Vaidya couldn’t stop thinking about how much she loved the topic she was studying.

“I would have to take a minute to sit back or just have a mental freak-out about how awesome all of this is,” she says. “I’m a total nerd when it comes to these things.”

After Graduation

Vaidya is a Grinnell graduate now, but she is still just as excited about economics.

A native of Indore in central India, she earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and Chinese from Grinnell. After graduation, she accepted a job with Morningstar Inc., a global financial services company headquartered in Chicago. Vaidya is an associate equity analyst in the division of Equity Research, where she researches technology stocks to empower investor success.

Vaidya’s Grinnell economics classes set her up well for work at Morningstar. “Grinnell teaches you how to research and how to learn in an efficient way. I think that that is what helped me approach my assignments in a more efficient manner,” she explains. 

Just as she did at Grinnell, Vaidya still feels that overwhelming sense of excitement when she thinks about her work. “Sometimes I still have those mini-freakouts that I talked about before, where I just don’t know what to do with all that excitement inside me,” she says. “Sometimes I text my parents and my friends that, oh my gosh, my job is so cool.”

Fun in Class

Vaidya recalls one of her Grinnell professors saying that economics is not only the study of the economy or money. “It’s the study of choices,” Vaidya says. “I’ve always remembered that definition. It’s the art of making choices.”

Vaidya came to Grinnell planning to take at least one course in economics while majoring in psychology or art. But her First-Year Tutorial, a class required of all first-year students and focused on analytical skills, changed her plans. Titled The Golden Age of Board Games, it was taught by Associate Professor of Economics Logan Lee. 

“It was extremely fun,” Vaidya says. “We played a lot of board games and we learned about the mechanics behind them. … And of course, my classmates were also really cool people, some of whom I stayed friends with until my senior year.” 

She liked her First-Year Tutorial so much, Vaidya asked Lee to be her adviser. “I liked Professor Lee and his teaching style. He always encouraged me to pursue my academic interests, and one of the biggest ones just so happened to be economics.”

Eyes Wide Open

Vaidya also remembers a class she took with Professor of Economics Bill Ferguson ’75 titled Seminar in Political Economy. It opened her eyes to the ways economics affects not just money and finance, but so many other aspects of life.

She wrote a paper for the class on the dispute between Turkey and Iraq over sharing the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. “I remember having so much fun writing that paper,” Vaidya says. “Professor Ferguson encouraged me to think about it in different ways. I think we were supposed to write a 20-page paper. I ended up with a 32-pager because I think I had too much fun with it.”

She adds, “I think that class really opened up the world in terms of applying econ more directly to the real-life socioeconomic and political events that we studied using strategy, game theory, and various fascinating concepts in the field.”

Vaidya says she is happy that she chose to attend Grinnell College. “Anytime I felt like learning something or doing something, I just let myself do it.”