When I pushed open the door to the kitchen, Cosmin looked up from the pan he was scrubbing. “Mr. America is here!” he shouted over to me with only a hint of sarcasm. And so would begin my shift at Victoria’s, the small-town eatery where I’d been washing dishes for the past two summers. As an off-the-books summer expat, ready to get elbow deep in the soup pot, this felt like the lowliest work in Scotland. In Victoria�...

This past summer, I interned at SelfMade, a technology startup in the midst of explosive growth. My time there inspired deep questions about the nature of management and team dynamics. On my first day, the CEO had me review the company’s “culture deck.” One slide stood out: it explained that we were there to “create something that is valuable for the world” and that the product should “have a positive impact by helping people express themselves.” Surprisingly, this wasn�...

At USC, I plan on dual majoring in economics and business administration in order to build a deep understanding of business dynamics. By studying the liberal arts alongside business, I’ll develop both a theoretical and practical understanding of market dynamics, financial theory, and strategic interactions; it’s USC’s curricular flexibility that makes this possible. As I work towards a degree in economics in the Dornsife College of Arts and Sciences, I especially look forward to classes such as...

Modern economics is indebted to Adam Smith, whose “invisible hand” theory posits how self-interested, unconnected agents coalesce into well-formed structures that no single agent predicted, intended, or necessarily desired. In a stock market, for example, no single person or central authority is responsible for setting prices, yet public equity markets are incredibly efficient. This coherent, beautiful pattern of self-organization makes economics fascinating, but the phenomenon is not unique; a similar one occurs within another interest of mine, systems biology. To...