<p>This is more directed towards those interested in social sciences, but for some non-money related reason chose economics? Why'd you choose economics over the other fields? And again, I'm not looking for money/finance related motivations, though I acknowledge those are legitimate reasons.</p>
<p>Other than money/finance related motivations, I would imagine the only other reason is that they liked economics or they wanted to enter a particular career path (regardless of salary) where that particular major would be beneficial to them.</p>
<p>I had a friend who majored in economics as a compromise with her parents, but I would imagine most people would choose economics because they liked it or because of job prospects.</p>
<p>Ya, I’m looking for specific reasons people like Econ. What inspires them about it? Do they think it is the most useful in achieving some world-changing goal? Do they like modelling systems with math? Maybe a personal anecdote or experience that put you on the econ path?</p>
<p>I’m an incoming freshman at Purdue for economics. I guess I can try helping out, since no one else has posted.
Why am I majoring in economics? Going into senior year of high school, I believed I wanted to be a lawyer. I wasn’t sure what to do for undergraduate exactly, so my initial gut reaction was business administration. However, I had decided to take AP Economics senior year. Throughout the course of the school year, I absolutely fell in love with it. I loved how logical it all was, how intuitive it could be (It was for me. Not necessarily for everyone), and how useful in real life it could be. Did it help that the teacher I had was amazing? Of course, but sometimes you just need that one teacher you set you on your path.
Now, I’m also planning on minoring in mathematics and philosophy. I never really liked math until my senior year, go figure (also probably because of the teacher). I was in calculus AB, but ended up taking the AP BC test (I also took the macro/micro econ AP tests. 5’s on AB subsection, BC, Macro, and Micro) because I believed that it would help me in the long run to learn as much as I could from this one teacher. I feel very prepared for multivariate calculus in the fall and beyond. My hope is graduate school, but we will see what happens.
What would I use it for? That, I haven’t figured out yet. For whatever reason I absolutely love reading various papers (mainly working papers that are available online), and could very easily see myself doing intense, mathematical economic research. To that extent, I’d be totally happy being a professor. However, I don’t know if I could have enough “Reach” in the world as a professor, so I may be tempted to try other things. Again, I can’t tell you my long term goals… All I know is I love economics (the theory, the math, the everything), and I could very easily dedicate the next 8-10 years of my life to the subject.
I hope that answers your question(s). I kind of just rambled on, sorry!</p>