After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.
College just didn't even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.
My undergraduate, I double-majored in biology and chemistry. Biology was kind of my love.
If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.
As an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of California, San Diego, I worked on infectious diseases at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
I was in film school as an undergrad with a focus on directing. Once I started working on shoots, I realized, 'Oh, I really like this cinematography thing.'
There's a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.
I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.
When I first started out in Houston, it was theater or bust. And I loved it. I still love it. And then I went to undergraduate and graduate school for acting.
My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.
It took me 8 years to graduate from undergraduate school because I kept 'communism from your door steps' for 3 1/2 years in between while serving in the U.S. Army.
As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.
I did graduate early and even received my master's degree in political science before I turned 22.
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
I decided to take two years between finishing undergraduate and beginning medical school to devote fully to medical research. I knew that I wanted to go to medical school during undergraduate, but I was also eager to get a significant amount of research experience.
My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.
After finishing my undergraduate work at the University of Iowa, where I took creative writing classes taught by Writer's Workshop students, I applied to half a dozen MFA writing programs.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
As an undergraduate, I studied the Greek and Roman classics, and I went to graduate school in classics intending to work on the presentation of moral issues in various Greek and Roman tragedies.
When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
As an undergrad, I studied engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma, and all my degrees are from engineering departments. My father wanted me to join him in the oil-field business in Oklahoma, but I wanted to be a scientist.
As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory.
