Economist Priya Shah ’10 visited campus last Thursday to speak to Upper School students in the “Capitalism & Its Critics” seminar. Shah is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Research and Statistics in Washington, where she has worked since 2019.
Her talk was less about monetary policy, which she said she would be glad to answer questions about, and more about what she described as “the moment I stopped being afraid of being wrong.”
“In high school you are rewarded for being right,” Shah said. “You answer a test question. The answer is either correct or it isn’t. I was very good at that. And when I got to graduate school and later to work, that skill ran out very fast. Nobody is going to hand you a problem that has a right answer in it anymore. Your job is to do the best thinking you can, publish it, and then be willing to be wrong in public.”
Shah credited her BPD Capstone mentor, the late Dr. Jonathan Fields, with “giving me the first permission I ever had to write something that might be wrong. I wrote a bad paper about 19th-century labor movements in Lancaster County. He gave it back to me with a note that said this is interesting; it is also wrong; fix it. That was the best note I have ever received.”
Shah’s visit is part of the Academy’s ongoing Alumni in Residence series, which brings alumni back to campus twice a term to speak with current students about work, judgment, and the years after graduation.
The next Alumni in Residence will be Wen Nakamura ’97, an architect based in Portland, Oregon, on March 11.