#57. Econ House (Friday, November 30, 2012)

What was your best day…of doing something that you wish you had done more of?

A month or so before my Duke MA Economics program started, four of the guys connected online and rented a place together.

Jason Simonsen (my best friend at Duke, #95) – Bay Area guy, sports analytics expert, former Davidson tight end and Stanford graduate assistant under Jim Harbaugh
Colin Garcia – El Paso guy, UT Austin
Jack Salvador – New Mexico guy, Northwestern
Isinachi Ebute – Lagos, Nigeria guy, former track athlete and engineer from Lehigh¹

They called it the Econ House. And it was the epicenter of many a party that went on during our MA. That Friday was the first one.

Before going, I didn’t know what to expect (I only knew Colin and Jack casually at the time). And on the bus to the Econ House, I even had a rare moment when I kind-of lamented leaving Canada and not being able to find a job there, and how much greater things might have been had I stayed there; specifically, had I gotten that research assistant job that I interviewed for².

The rest of the night kind of dispelled that whole notion – never to really return again.

I was there early, met up with all the guys, and had a lot of sangria. I met Jason for the first time, and we instantly connected. He struck me right away as a really cool guy, and we ended up talking for a long time about a lot of different things – he told me all about Davidson, and Andrew Luck, and his past life as an FDIC risk examiner, and his fascination with Bayesian stats; then when Gangnam Style came on he did his famous dance that everyone had been waiting for.

Much of that night ended up being a blur. Most of the students from both years of our program ended up coming, so the whole party felt like a bunch of separate parties packed into this one space – with classmates gathered on the porch, on the stairs, on the back deck, in multiple clusters in the living room. And as was starting to become habit, I was having the time of my life drinking and weaving my way from group to group, meeting new classmates and getting to know the classmates I did know even better.

But then I made the same mistake I made at Brian’s party (#62). When Walter mentioned that he was driving back, my natural instinct from the previous twenty-one years kicked in and I hopped in with him to a ride back home – way too freaking early.

Regret filled me for the rest of the night and the days following, and this time it stuck. Because I never, ever made that mistake again.

Which made him an unpopular person around campus when he had his jersey on.
At the same institution that I’d start working for as an economist a year and a half later.