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Obsessed with Numbers
Andrew Metrick's fantasy vacation has nothing to do
with beaches, mountains, or French food. The self-described
"data nut" finds Nirvana in thick books of statistics – on
any subject. "When I was a kid, my favorite books were the
baseball encyclopedia and the World Almanac," says
Metrick, 36. "I would open up the almanac and begin to organize
the numbers by category – I'd look at the biggest
buildings in the world, for example, then categorize them
based on the year they were built, what city they were in –
things like that." "I was not a great mathematician; it's not
that kind of thing," he says, commenting on his life-long
love for numbers. "They are deeply logical, analytical people.
I just liked rows and rows of numbers. I liked to look at
them, I liked to hold them, and I liked to know things
about them."
As a teen, Metrick spent an entire summer building
models to predict how well baseball players would perform,
typing most of the baseball encyclopedia into the family
computer. In graduate school, instead of writing his dissertation,
he worked thousands of hours categorizing and scrutinizing
basketball statistics – and graduated a year later as a
result. "Yeah, I'm a little bit of a crazy person, " he says,
laughing. "I wanted to work with big data sets and try to
make sense of them."
His work has bounced to and from a variety of disciplines,
from economics to a range of finance issues, but it
is all linked by interesting, unexamined sets of data. "That's
where the passion for research is for me. A lot of my work
has been driven by the fact that suddenly I'll become obsessed
with a certain kind of data." In recent years, Metrick
has learned to channel this tendency, focusing his energies
on projects that will lead to useful conclusions "instead of
typing baseball statistics. It's only as I've gotten older that
I've realized that this is what I need to do," he says.
Metrick grew up in a community on Long Island, a land
of doctors, lawyers, and executives, with only a vague sense
of what a professor was. It wasn't until he went to college
that he found himself drawn to academia. As an undergraduate
at Yale, he worked as a research assistant for James
Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who died in 2002.
"He was an extraordinary man. You see someone like that,
and you say 'I want to be like that.' It's kind of an impossible
standard, but you're always striving," Metrick says. His
summers on Wall Street reinforced his academic leanings.
"It seemed like hard work," he says, laughing. "I thought,
'Gee, being a professor seems like a lot of fun. You don't
have to work all night, and you don't have to wear a suit."
He was inspired, he says, by different elements of his
parents. His father, who recently retired as an investment
banker at Bear Stearns, also worked as a CFO for a Fortune
500 company. "He's a great, natural economist, largely
self-taught," says Metrick. "His background was in
engineering and law, and he kind of taught himself
economics and finance and has fantastic intuition.
Growing up talking to him was a great way to learn."
His mother, meanwhile, had "an amazing capacity for
work and self-sacrifice for her family." His parents
divorced when he was young, and while his father lived
nearby, Metrick's mother "took care of three kids,
then earned a degree, then took care of three kids and
worked" – a fact he finds all the more astonishing today
as he and wife Susie struggle to juggle day-to-day life,
work, and 18-month-old David. "My parents were both
late bloomers in a way," Metrick says. "In my family,
we seem to be that way. So I'm looking forward to
finally getting my act together."
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