Daniel graduated from WIS with the IB Diploma in 2017. He is now doing his Master in Behavioural Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam.
I joined WIS in 2013 with little academic interest. At that point, I wanted to become a mechanical engineer or something similar – I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted. I remember getting around 38% in my first Business Studies test … not great. Nevertheless, I realised I had a profound interest in the subject and that (almost by itself) helped me excel at it.
In the IB, this interest shifted towards economics as I became fascinated by the extent to which economics was involved in such diverse topics and how it helped my own decision making. Economics studies humans behaviour and are involved in almost everything after all. I cannot take all the credit for my enthusiasm, because much like Warren Buffet attributes most of his success to winning the ovarian lottery, I additionally won the “passionate-teacher” lottery with my economics teacher Mr. McLennan. I remember the business opportunity Mr. McLennan offered me in one of the school breaks, which was Inflatable Security Guards because they “essentially do the same thing”.
My post-WIS journey started in the fall of 2018, when I got accepted to the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam. I first thought I do some travelling and so I moved to Australia for six months to do just that.
The hardships I endured throughout the first five months of working and the joys of travelling in the last month were incredibly conducive to my personal development. I strongly believe that a gap year before your studies is essential because you won’t have the right mindset nor the time after your studies when you concern yourself with entering the labour market. It may not seem so at face value, but in hindsight, it was the most rewarding experience I had.
In September 2018 I started at the Erasmus School of Economics. In my first year, I joined an investment society where students compete against each other in groups by constructing an investment portfolio. The group with the highest return relative to risk would win the annual competition. After doing this for three years, I can safely say that finance within an investment capacity is not my thing. I also undertook some teaching jobs at my university. This entailed teaching weekly material to a small group of students and solving exercises with them, in my case for the courses International Economics and History of Economic Thought. The university relies almost entirely on students to teach these tutorials. I had a great experience doing this because I developed many useful skills.
However, through the questions I received from students and the ones I asked myself when preparing for the lessons, I realised how unrealistic standard economic models are (turns out, we aren’t as rational as we think we are). When I partook in the course Behavioural Economics, I immediately became an aficionado, because it was raising and trying to answer the same concerns that were almost universal to all students of standard economics. Fast-forward to today, I finished my bachelor’s, and I am currently doing my master’s degree in behavioural economics.
If there is one message I would like to express, it is that you should always try new things. A dislike of one’s experience does not mean it was a failure or that it was a mistake. I learned the most about myself and my interests from the things that I did not like because much like science, we make progress through mistakes.