Lilly Chen
Pronouns: she/her
Graduation year: 2019
Hometown: Hillsborough, New Jersey
Currently living in: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Current occupation: Startup founder
What was your experience like at CC as an Economics major?
I loved being a Math Econ major at CC. My favorite class was an upper level behavioral economics class where we conceived, executed, and published a paper with an original thesis as a team. It was the quintessential experience because I learned so much about myself, how I work with others, and how to get a project across the finish line.
Why were you interested in focusing on Economics as your major?
I fell in love with it, truthfully. I took an intro econ class because my high school math teacher said I'd probably be good at it. I was lucky to have really passionate professors for my intro classes who nurtured my love for studying causality.
How are you using your major in your post-CC life?
I think people are surprised when I tell them I regularly use the technical skills I learned from my Math Econ degree. When I was fundraising venture capital for the first time, I had to calculate the total size of a market with a bottom-up approach. This meant I was doing function estimation and then integrating the area under the curve. Besides the math skills, I also use an experimental economics approach in my startup. It's a lot of hypotheses for human behavior, and then finding a way to isolate that variable.