Faculty Feature
He’s Jus t an
By John Wall
xcitable conomist
Photography: J.D. Cavrich
Brad Andrew Finds Academic Life on an Uptick You would think that talking to an economist would be very cut and dried. Lots of explanations starting with “Well, the numbers show…” and “According to the laws of supply and demand…” Brad Andrew, associate professor of economics, can talk that talk, but after a few minutes of conversation with him it becomes clear that it’s the uncertainty of how things can turn out—a market’s development, a college’s investment strategy, an academic career path— that truly fascinate him.
Juniata
“I loved the intuition of economics,” says Andrew, who came to Juniata in 2001. “I wanted to understand things better. I wanted to learn why certain relationships exist or why this phenomenon occurs.” Andrew’s Kreskin-like intuition was working overtime when he took his first classes as a freshman at Framingham
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State University outside of Boston, Mass. The son of an electrical engineer, Brad and his brother were always expected to go to college, so he headed off freshman year to take calculus and microeconomics. “Calculus wasn’t very exciting to me, but the microeconomics course was mind-blowing,” he recalls. “It really moved me from someone whose (beliefs) were far left, to someone who is more in the center. Many of the arguments economists make have an important logic that appealed to me.” After his undergraduate days, where the time he spent out of the classroom was spent working for big money at a merchandising warehouse, Andrew thought he should “go the business route” to earn a doctorate, so he entered an MBA program. But as he is fond of saying, “it didn’t excite me.” What thrilled him were the stories behind the numbers. So he entered the doctoral program at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He explains: “Most people who go on to Ph.D. programs are thinking of working in academia or some kind of financial ‘quant’ job.” (A quant, in biz-speak, is a number-crunching Wall Street quantitative analyst.)
Obviously, since Andrew’s default mode of dress is shorts and a polo shirt, he opted for the intellectual side of economics. UConn offered a teaching fellowship, plus it kept Andrew within cheering distance of his beloved Boston sports teams. Indeed, Andrew is instantly recognizable throughout campus by an ever-present Red Sox cap. But, in graduate school, sports fandom took a back seat to learning how to teach. “I needed to understand the material inside and out,” he says. “So I created a list of really bizarre questions and I would work through the answers to learn it.” In instance after instance, Andrew made choices based not on what paid the most money or offered the “hottest” topic for academic economists. In fact, he spent some time researching an economic analysis of Silicon Valley compared to Boston’s high-tech Route 128 corridor. However, that topic, yes, failed to excite the budding economist. Instead, he studied international trade between Glasgow, Scotland and the Chesapeake area during America’s colonial years. He found that, while Glasgow’s urban development was stimulated by that trade relationship,