I
am Garret Christensen, a PhD
student in the
economics
program at UC Berkeley that will, mark my words, eventually
graduate. I have taken courses in development
economics, law and economics, labor economics, and applied
econometrics, and I have
passed the field exam
in Development and Law and Economics. I
don't necessarily
like economics for the theory itself, but I do think it's a useful tool
to analyze pretty much any aspect of human behavior. So in my
research, I hope to apply
economics and econometrics to things I'm already interested in:
football, movies, all sorts of progressive political issues,
water issues in the west, recreation on federal land,
and poverty and violence in developing countries, among other things.
For personal purposes:
The kids in the picture are not mine, they're my niece
and nephew. They're stacking pebbles on my head. Sierra
wouldn't talk to me, as she is crazy shy, but she opened up after I let
her engage in the
pebble-stacking. I was reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. It
didn't really do it for me. Cat's
Cradle, now there's a book.
Anyway, I'm from the socio-economic Shangri-la (read: snooty suburb)
known as
Reston, Virginia. I went to Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science (Nerds) and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. Then
I
volunteered in Seoul,
South Korea for two years. Then I went to college, majored in
economics, walked
across
the country twice, and ran a bunch of marathons
and
ultra-marathons. My 26.2 mile marathon PR is 3:00:23, and I ran
my
first 100-mile ultramarathon in August 2006. I withdrew from
school to conduct field research in rural western Kenya for six
months. Then I spent May-October of 2007 hiking the Continental Divide Trail from Mexico to Canada
and back. I like Radiohead, Kurt Vonnegut,
and films by Ingmar Bergman.
For professional
purposes: