What could drive a girl who grew up in Tucson, Arizona to work and live in the Middle East? During a recent interview, the Arizona Council on Economic Education found a connection between Lauren Peate’s sound training in economics and her passion to make a difference in the world.
Economics was offered as an elective when Lauren was in high school at University High in Tucsonfrom2001-2005. Although it was a very new subject to most high school students, she decided to take the class because she wanted to learn about what the economy is andalso because it was taught by one of her favorite teachers, Ms. Barbara Gray.
“Ms. Gray really engaged and challenged us so I decided to take AP Economics during my junior year and, during my senior year, did an additional elective on International Economics where my research project was on trade policy between the U.S. and China. My team and I participated in and won the economics challenge state championship in 2005, so we traveled to San Francisco for the regional final. It was an awesome experience. During this trip, I was also introduced to Stanford University and ended up attending college there and majoring in economics.”
Lauren’s journey to major in economics was not as straight-forward as one might think. Raised by two parents in the medical profession, Lauren considered becoming a doctor while she was in college. A summer medical internship in Nicaragua profoundly changed her. Lauren spent three months working with a government-run clinic, where many of the patients had infected wounds due to poor blood circulation caused by untreated diabetes.Lauren became frustrated that the clinic spent so much time treating the outcome—infected wounds—and not the causes: unhealthy diets, lack of medical information and poor sanitation. She realized that the way to prevent the problem was to address the systemic issues. Lauren’s economic way of thinking led her to focus on the study of economics.
After graduation, Lauren won a Fulbright scholarship to do research in Morocco on how to give economic opportunities to local women who survived domestic violence. Once again as a deep and critical economic thinker, Lauren observed the severeeconomic limitation of these women due to the country’s high unemployment rate and the women’s inability to access the global market because they did not speak a global language and could not use computers. Lauren decided that her mission must ultimately be to create new opportunities and new jobs as a way to grow the economy and improve standards of living. Her desire and motivation to do more to help women entrepreneurs led her to Jordan where she is a business consultant advising startup companies to create wealth for themselves and jobs for the economy.
Lauren told us that she speaks Arabic and her dream is to run an investment development fund to support diverse startup founders around the world. She frequently applies principles of economics such as incentives and opportunity cost in her practice.Hermacroeconomics knowledgehelps her understand the broader economy and design relevant policies. Her microeconomics knowledge helps her to advise individual businesses.
Today economics education is a required course with academic standards applicable from Kindergarten level to 12th grade. Every student has an opportunity like Lauren to sharpen their mind, look at the world differently and solve problems.