Wendy Edelberg (PhD'03 Economics, MBA'97) joins the podcast talk about her motivations to pursue a PhD in economics and her career with the Federal Reserve, Council of Economic Advisors, and now as a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Wendy Edelberg is a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where she also served as director of The Hamilton Project from 2020 to March 2025. Prior to joining Brookings, Edelberg served as Chief Economist at the Congressional Budget Office, Executive Director of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, on both President Obama and President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and the Federal Reserve Board. In 2022, she was appointed as co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable. A macroeconomist, Edelburg's research has spanned from household spending and saving decisions to the economic effects of fiscal policy, to systemic risks in the financial system.
Edelburg earned her PhD from the Department of Economics in 2003 and her MBA in 1997 from the Booth School of Business. She received her BA in Economics from Columbia University in 1993.
Kelly:
Hello and welcome to Dialogo, a podcast of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. In each episode, we interview one of our graduate alumni to talk about their career path and reflecting on their time at the university. I am Kelly Pollack. I am the Dean of Students in the Division of the Social Sciences here at UChicago.
Paul:
And I'm Paul Post, Deputy Dean in the Social Science division at the University of Chicago.
Kelly:
Today's guest is Dr. Wendy Edelberg, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution who received her PhD in economics from us in 2003. Wendy, welcome to Dialogo.
Wendy:
Well, I am really happy to be here. I did indeed received my PhD in economics in 2003.
Kelly:
Yes.
Wendy:
It was a long time ago.
Kelly:
Yes. So we're going to jump backwards, but first let's stay in the current moment and tell us a little bit about your work at Brookings. What is Brookings and what do you do there?
Wendy:
Oh, what is Brookings? So Brookings is often thought of as the preeminent think tank in the United States, which I'd like to believe is true. There are a bunch of different areas that Brookings weighs in on. I'm part of economic studies. We're a collection of mostly economists that think about things from ranging from macroeconomics to healthcare to finance, so running the gamut. But there's a bunch of different areas at Brookings including foreign policy, an area of Brookings that thinks about what's happening in state and local communities. So we're a pretty big organization, but my little world of it is economic studies. So what scholars do at Brookings is not wildly different on a day-to-day basis from what academics do. In that we publish research, we make sure people have read our research, we go to conferences. We think deep thoughts, but I think what makes us different is that we are always laser focused on making sure that the research we are doing is connecting to policy, and that's not just in the kind of research we're doing, but it's in the way we're communicating it.
So if we want our research to be effective and for policymakers to hear it, we have to be super thoughtful about how much math is included in a research paper and maybe that all gets put in an appendix so it changes the way we do things, but it doesn't necessarily change the kind of work that you would see us doing if you could be a fly on the wall. We have our hands at the keyboard trying to do thoughtful research.
Paul:
On that note, and this is partially out of my own curiosity but I think would also help provide context for our listeners is do you want to say a few things about maybe the most recent project that you've worked on?
Wendy:
I have done two things most recently and they're very much unrelated except for the fact that they're both in economics and related to the macroeconomy, which will hopefully prove what I was saying about the fact that there's a wide breadth of stuff that we do in economic studies at Brookings. So one is I just completed a very big work effort on the supply side shocks and inflation that culminated in a paper I wrote trying to create a taxonomy of what are all of the different kinds of supply shocks and how do they affect inflation and how does inflation get amplified. I did a literature review of almost a hundred research papers that have been written in mostly recent years about that subject, and I commissioned three papers actually for mostly academics on where the cutting edge of the research is on supply side shocks and inflation, and then it culminated in a conference where we put out those three papers and we had a big splashy set of speakers and we got lots of attention.
The other thing that I've done is with some co-authors is I've done a fair bit on what's happening with immigration, measuring what's happening, what happened with immigration in 2025, what we think is going to happen in 2026, just simply documenting those facts as harder than you might think, and then thinking about how those changes in immigration have mattered for the macroeconomy. So you can see in both of these subjects, I am very much using the economics training that I received at the University of Chicago. I feel like I use my Ph.D. all the time.
Kelly:
What originally brought you to the University of Chicago? Why did you decide that that was the place that you wanted to train and I believe you first got an MBA and then the Ph.D. so I'd love to hear about that path.
Wendy:
Yeah, so much to explain. I was an RA at the Chicago Fed, which was a really good job. If anybody is listening to this as an undergrad or as a recent grad and thinking about getting a PhD, if you can swing getting one of those RA jobs at one of the Federal Reserve banks, that's a great job to take before you think about going off and getting a PhD. So I had that job. The Chicago Fed had a program that they no longer having quite the exact same setup where they fully paid for a master's. I mean, it was crazy.
They not only fully paid for a master's, but they would pay for half the cost of your books. And so I said, "Well, I'll take that," and I only applied to get an MBA at the University of Chicago and they paid for it and I did it nights and weekends and I did it in econometrics and finance and it was great. I did it because I always had my eye on getting a PhD and I was happy to get a lot more master's level econ and math under my belt before getting a PhD, but I should also say it provided a psychological boost when the actual PhD program was really soul-crushing and hard. There was a psychological boost of knowing I had an outside option, so that's why I got an MBA and then applied to get a PhD in economics there. I applied all over the place and was lucky enough to have a lot of choices.
Part of it was personal reasons, I won't lie. Part of it, just because I wanted to stay in Chicago. Part of it was, yeah, I don't know that I'm proud of either of these reasons. Part of it was personal reasons and part of it was I simply still had. It had not yet been beaten out of me that I wanted to do ... If there was a choice between taking a harder path and an easier path, I wanted the harder path. That was just how I was wired. I have mostly beaten that out of myself, but the University of Chicago was thought to be the hardest econ program and I was like, "Well, sign me up."
Paul:
I think that's a point of pride still. So I'm sure that if any of our faculty hear this, they'll be like, "Yes. Yes, we still want to maintain that standard of being the epitome of the University of Chicago is where fun goes to die." So no, this is terrific. So given, given what you just shared about your path and how it led you to Chicago and so forth, one thing we talked about, we were talking about offline before we started recording, but especially for our listeners who listened to our first season of the podcast, our first season was with faculty who have been in policy, in government, either as elected officials or working. We interviewed someone who worked for a Federal Reserve Bank, and so love to be able to hear more about your experience in government and maybe how that then led you to say, "This is great, I enjoy this, but I actually do want to move into the think tank space."
Wendy:
Job out of graduate school was at the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Board in a bunch of ways, particularly for newly minted PhDs is very much like a huge economics department. You are surrounded by very likely a bunch of young economists who do what you do so you're not lonely in the way that you might be intellectually lonely in an academic department, and you are doing your own research and being evaluated on whether or not your research is good and it's getting published and it's moving the field forward. And then you have these assignments that you have to complete with regards to monetary policy or whatever your role is or forecasting wherever you've been, whatever division you're in at the Fed, which is a little bit akin. Certainly in the interview process, they describe it this way, it's a little bit akin to what your teaching loads might be.
And so it was a great place for me because it's super empirical and I was always a super empirical graduate student and I loved having so many incredibly smart colleagues. Now I should say that's not the world that economists necessarily inhabit for their whole careers at the Fed. What will sometimes happen or maybe even often happen at the Fed is that people will find they're really good and really interested at working on whether it's the regulatory issues or the monetary policy issues or the forecasting issues or the finance issues, and they gravitate towards that and they're rewarded for that, and that becomes more what they do and less the academic style research and some people go the opposite direction. So the Fed, at least in my experience there was amenable to both kinds of worlds. The game changer for me was the Fed loaned me out to the White House to work in the Council of Economic Advisers in 2008. Nothing happened in 2008.
Paul:
I was going to say, there's a lot that we could unpack. We could just spend the whole podcast talking about that, right?
Wendy:
So I was at the Council of Economic Advisers in the height of the financial crisis under the Bush administration and then saw the transition to the Obama administration, and then the Obama administration asked me to stay on, and that was just an amazing time. Yes, I was using my skills as a PhD economist, but I was also developing a lot of other skills and it was just incredibly intense, totally insane and felt really important, and it also kind of beat fear out of me. I think the University of Chicago, for all of the good things that came out of my time at the University of Chicago, I think I maybe graduated with a fair bit of fear and being intimidated by research and being nervous that I wasn't as good as my colleagues. And that research idea is not good enough, and I think I had that in my first years at the Fed.
There's no room for that in the midst of a financial crisis working at the White House. And so it was a good thing for me to just have fear beaten out of me. You just had to show up and get the job done and answer hard questions. From now, then I became ... there's a world in which in a different universe, Wendy goes back to the Fed and continues her life at the Fed, and maybe even then there are people at the Fed who go back to academic institutions. There's a universe in which that's true, but that's not the universe that we are currently inhabiting. Instead, I became one of those D.C. nomads. So what happened is Congress stood up a commission to figure out why we had a financial crisis, and I was asked to be the research director of that commission and actually continued to be loaned out from the Fed.
And I did that just because it seemed like a really interesting opportunity and I actually was well-placed to do it because I knew a lot about the financial crisis and it was a management job and I had never done management and thought it would set me up well for rising through the ranks at the Fed. Okay. Fast-forward, I became executive director of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was a little bit, I would think how I would feel after doing an Ironman race. I'm really happy to have done it and I'm really super proud of myself and I would literally never do that again. And we wrote a book on why we had a financial crisis, and it's a really good book, and in fact, I'm super proud of it. A bunch of my friends in academia used that book in their courses to explain why we had a financial crisis.
So again, using my PhD, but now I'm managing a staff of 65 people and I'm working very closely to the world of politics and again, developing tons of different skills. Then I went off to CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. Again, I could have gone back to the Fed, but I didn't. My old boss from the Fed, Doug Elmendorf was director of CBO and he hired me to go run the macroeconomic analysis division at the Congressional Budget Office. So I did that and then I became Chief Economist at the Congressional Budget Office. CBO is an amazing place, a truly amazing place. The reason that I left the Congressional Budget Office and went off to Brookings was because I had now in my career developed this habit of always wanting to do things at the very edge of my skillset and be afraid and the high wire act of doing things that maybe I didn't really have the skills to do.
And I had traveled the learning curve at CBO and loved the mission, but I felt constrained by it. I wanted to be working on whatever I wanted to work on, and CBO very appropriately is reactive to Congress. And so then I was hired to run something called the Hamilton Project at Brookings where I commissioned work mostly from academics. So I, again, you can see this sort of through line that throughout my career I have been, I think an effective bridge between the world of academia and the world of policy, and I'm really one of my skills, one of my superpowers is that I can do that communication and so commissioned a lot of work from academics, did a lot of my own research and continued to gain skills stepped down from ... I am going on so long. I am so I apologize to all of your listeners.
Paul:
No, you shouldn't apologize. This is fantastic. This is exactly what we want to hear.
Wendy:
Okay, so podcast, I am talking. There we go. Those are the rules. So the last longest serving director of the Hamilton Project had done it for two and a half years. It was typically a kind of short-term kind of thing. I had done it for five years, which was a very long time. And so I stepped down and I am a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings and trying to think like, okay, what's the next thing I'm going to do that's going to put me at the edge of my skillset and be really scary? But as a senior fellow, I've put out research. It's the same thing. It's very similar to academia in that you're trying to figure out what should I work on? Where is my value added? Where are my efforts best served in the world? That's where I am.
Kelly:
Yeah. So you've talked a few times about being able to speak a language, communicate to policymakers, but you've also written for the public as well. So you had an op-ed in the New York Times in November that I, a non-economist could totally understand, which is great. Your work has been cited on Jimmy Kimmel. Could you talk a little bit about what it takes to take these really big complicated concepts and make them comprehensible by everyday people?
Wendy:
First, that this is an important skill set for academics and non-academics alike in that, for example, at the Congressional Budget Office, CBO puts a lot of weight on really prioritizes clear writing, accurate writing, but very clear writing. And when newly minted PhDs or people who had been in academia for a while, we get hired at CBO, I would often work with them. And we used the language, I think just to help people's egos, you need to learn to write like not an academic. And in reality, what we were actually saying is you need to learn to write well, and we've all written, sorry, not written. We've all read academic papers that are written really well and we've read academic papers that are really hard to understand. And so part of this is just putting a lot of emphasis on being understandable, valuing that. But the other thing is then I go a step further and recognize, okay, where do we as economists take shortcuts in talking to each other?
Something like using jargon, appropriate jargon, right? Because we can all speak the same language, whether it's any elasticity or the natural rate of interest or potential output. These are all jargony things that mean that we can talk to each other very quickly, and if I want somebody else to understand me, there is a hundred percent a way to make all of those concepts understandable with a few more words and slowing down. And it just means I can't talk shorthand and I probably won't be able to say as much, but people can understand these concepts. They are intuitive, and so it's putting value on that and saying, I am less effective if only economists can understand me.
Paul:
This is a great point, and I don't want to get too much into the economics weeds on this point, but I think it'll lead to kind of a broader point than I know that Kelly and I really want to get into, and especially as a goal for a lot of the conversations we're having this season, but just sticking strictly with the econ part of it, what role do you see in the fact that economists tend to communicate not just through the jargon, but also through mathematics and sometimes to the extent to where you almost say you're using the mathematics for the sake of using the mathematics where it's maybe not even necessary really, just again, this might just be my own curiosity, but I'd love to hear your views on that, especially in light of what you were just saying.
Wendy:
I mean, the math is helpful in that it makes whatever assumptions are behind your analysis, very, very concrete. It makes channels of influence very concrete because this is on the right-hand side of the equation, and that's on the left-hand side of the equation. This has a lag on it. There are ways in which math is super useful. Of course, it can just be used to keep people from understanding your work. I appreciate all the bad things, but I had a newly revived appreciation for the use of math when I was commissioning these papers on supply side shocks and inflation. The cutting edge work on how supply side shocks matter is pretty hard going, which is probably always true with cutting edge work, but the way that if relative prices change, so the relative price difference between labor, the price of labor, which is to say the wage and the price of gasoline or energy, you can figure out the relative prices of those two things.
And if that relative price changes, that in and of itself can influence inflation down the line. And I was motivating, compelling, forcing the academics who I had commissioned work from to explain these concepts without math or with only a little bit of math, because the idea was to get policymakers or perhaps more realistically their staff who was willing to put in the time and effort to read these papers probably multiple times to get them to understand what the issues were. I was asking these academics to translate their work that was pretty mathematically intensive into paragraphs in English that could be understood. And we had a hard time, and it meant that I was asking a gajillion questions of like, "Wait a minute, that's a contemporaneous effect. You've described it in words as a contemporaneous effect, but I don't see how it can be contemporaneous. Don't you mean that this takes time?" And they were like, "Oh, yes, of course we wrote it wrong. It was hard." And I kind of wish like, oh, if we could just do the math. So I'm of two minds about this.
Paul:
But at the same time, it sounds like as you were describing it, that while the math is valuable and it lends a certain precision, the same could also be said of then trying to translate that because then it's saying, well, are you actually thinking about this concept in the way that you thought you were thinking about it?
Wendy:
Indeed, I would like to believe that some of our conversations were revelatory in that sense for the authors I was working with of like, oh, I mean, I guess we are making that really strong assumption. And now that I have to put that really strong assumption in words, I'm less comfortable with it. It was one thing when it was just a mathematical equation of this is my assumption, but when, "No, we are going to write that out and we are going to be explicit," which I mean, it's just part of, again, this is cutting edge research. I don't mean to disparage these authors. They're doing incredibly hard work where they're bringing a field along with them. But yes, I'd like to believe that that was a useful process for them too.
Paul:
That's great. And the reason why I wanted to ask that is as I indicated, I think without it being just specific to economics, that question kind of leads to a broader question that we're really interested in, which is, and you've already alluded to this with your own personal experience, but one of the things we're really interested in hearing about is kind of the role, if you will, the PhD in the contemporary world. To what extent is it valuable, to what extent is it needed? Now, obviously those conversations that you were just referring to are highly specialized conversations that only someone who has that kind of training is going to be able to engage in. But just to play devil's advocate, one might say, "Well, that's great that you're able to have those conversations among other PhDs, but why should the rest of society benefit from that, hear from that?" And that's something that we're really interested in hearing about. We'd love to be able to hear your views, especially given all the experiences that you've had.
Wendy:
Given a harder question to answer in the exact current moment. Because a lot of the work that people like me that I do is less valued. It just has less influence this month relative to perhaps a couple of years ago. But fingers crossed that will not always be the case. So I'm going to assume that's not the case as I answer this. I'll say a couple things. I'm going to talk about how valuable a PhD is, and then I'm going to caveat it in a whole bunch of ways. So first, it helps me cut through the noise and bring a more disciplined thought to questions just on a day-to-day basis. I'll give you a really simple example. So in the midst of COVID, I was talking to Hill staff who were thinking about different kinds of fiscal policies that they might roll out given how incredibly disruptive the economy was.
And at that moment in COVID, restaurants were doing very badly and they were thinking, how can we help restaurants? This was a time when things were really shut down, and the suggestion on the floor that a lot of this Hill staff was getting behind was, we need to give people essentially vouchers, potential customers vouchers to go to restaurants. And I was like, "No, no. That is not what we want. What we want is to give some kind of fiscal support to the people working at the restaurants." And what I just described seemed so simple, but this is true for so much of economics that once you actually figure it out and do the hard work, it all should feel like common sense, maybe not intuitive common sense, but once you untangle the logic, yeah, I get that. That's kind of common sense.
So much of what we do is like that, but I was able to untangle their thinking very quickly and describe, no, this is who needs support and this is how they need support, and this is how you'll do better with inflation and this is how you'll do better with changing sectoral responses. And that was because I had a PhD. I'll just go on a bit of a tangent here just for a second, which is, and going back maybe to the math issue again, I think part of the challenge is because so much of what economists do if they do it well ultimately feels like common sense. I think sometimes we feel sheepish about that, and that's one of the reasons why we put up all of these jargon barriers and all of these math barriers because we feel a little sheepish about the fact that the end result of this 40 page paper that was actually a year of my life is actually like, oh, I kind of figured something out that now in retrospect is completely obvious, but that's okay.
You just have to own that. And there are lots of hard things where it's true that what we have figured out is common sense or what we are debating is this sort of common sense interpretation, right? Or is that sort of this other common sense interpretation, right? Anyway, so I think I was using my PhD in that conversation. Now, the caveat to all of this in that, so maybe before I do the caveat, I will just reinforce having a PhD disciplines my thinking, it has allowed me to talk to people who are at the cutting edge, where what they're doing is super hard, and I don't just have to rely on what I learned and the basic ways of doing things. I can actually extend my knowledge, I can extend my knowledge, and I can question people in really hard complicated ways. Again, using my training, the caveat is I interact on a day-to-day basis with many people who are super, super skilled in some area of economics who don't have PhDs, sometimes don't have any master's degree at all, nothing beyond econ.
Excuse me. Sometimes people who have undergrad degrees and they're reporters who have been working on a particular issue for a very long time, and they are as good on an issue or better than anyone I talk to who's a colleague with a PhD. And I will say things in conversations with reporters and they will come back to me with an incredibly sophisticated question that actually undoes the point that I just made. And I realized, "Oh, yes, you're absolutely right. I hadn't considered that. That's a really important point. Let me walk backwards and incorporate that in."
So you don't need a PhD to be able to analyze the economy or be super useful in pushing ahead, analysis the economy or understanding of the economy. But it helps.
Kelly:
So I mentioned earlier, I'm not an economist, never taken an econ class, but I do have a question that I think, I follow politics closely. And so there was so much talk in the last election cycle about the vibes economy, that there are these things that are supposed to be markers that the economy is working, and those things were all there. And yet everyone said, "I don't have a good economic situation." So I'm wondering how you as an economist measure what is a healthy economy, what are the markers? And if you think that that's changing or there may be different ways that we need to think about what are these markers of a strong economy?
Wendy:
So before I try to answer that directly, I first want to pause on the whole vibes thing because I think that this is a good example of how economists need to listen to non-economists. The sociologists have a lot of important things to say in terms of understanding how people feel, for example, and talking to sociologists and sort of using some of their ways of thinking about the world. My thought was in the past couple of years, and even now when you ask someone how are you feeling about the economy or even how are you feeling about your own economic situation? And they think that the world is basically on fire, and I don't mean that this is just because you've asked somebody who really hates Trump. I mean, you could ask somebody who is a massive Trump supporter and they'll still think that the world's on fire and Trump's helping to put it out. So this is bipartisan. If you ask somebody and they think the world's on fire, but they have a good wage and their job's pretty good, they're not going to parse that.
This is not the way people think about their lives. If a pollster asks them a question and they want to communicate, everything sucks, they're going to say everything sucks. Because it's not like the pollsters, they're going to get the other pollster the next day saying, "Okay, but how do you feel about the world?"
If they have the opportunity, if they're going to take the time and the energy to talk to a pollster and they think everything sucks, they're going to say that. And so I think that that has been why people are so unhappy just because the broader world, regardless of their own economic circumstances. Now, what I think means for a healthy economy is, so, this is relevant because in part it means what I think means for a healthy economy might be it's relevant to, I don't know what you might want for optimal fiscal policy or optimal monetary policy, but it may not be the most relevant thing for how to improve people's welfare and how they feel their lives and what's going to get the next politician elected.
So there might be a big gap between those things. But I think the unemployment rate is a really, really useful indicator, and this is worth just dwelling on for a second because what's happening in the labor market right now is super confusing, and I think it's because of immigration policy. Immigration policy has massively restrained labor supply growth. And I think that that's the primary reason why we see such very low gains in employment month after month, and perhaps even why firms are doing less hiring after job openings because they see that the labor market is shrinking, and so they're just not going to put out a lot of job openings to expand because labor market is shrinking, and yet the unemployment rate's really low. And I think that's creating a lot of cognitive dissonance, and I think a lot of people are saying, wow, the labor market is terrible. Oh my God, I'm really worried. And it's like, no, no, no, your little world is fine and the unemployment rate is pretty low and wage growth is pretty low, but it's going to take people a long time if we continue with this immigration policy to change their understanding of what a strong labor market is.
Paul:
It's interesting you mentioned this about the disconnect pollsters have. I know in my area of political science, it's well recognized that there's a similar phenomenon with respect to how people feel about their representative or their senator and how they feel about the Senate or the house. They'll say, "The Senate can't do anything. It's totally ineffective, but my senator's great. The house, also, it's a disaster, but I'm going to vote for my member of the house." And it's that inability to kind of say, "Well, one of these two things may not go together."
This has been terrific. This really has been terrific. Now Kelly, should I ask the question that you always like to ask, which is about-
Kelly:
Yeah, no, go ahead.
Paul:
This has been a great intellectual conversation both about your time at UChicago as well as since UChicago and the concept so forth. But one thing we also like to ask is when you were at UChicago, what did you do for fun?
Kelly:
It's always a fraught question.
Paul:
And especially again, recognizing you were an econ and fun goes to die, so maybe there wasn't, but I'm sure that there was fun had.
Wendy:
So the first year of the econ PhD program, at least when I was there, is brutal, truly brutal. And what I did for fun is that after the last problem set was turned in on Friday, which was late on Friday, I gave myself off from that point on Friday through Saturday evening, I don't actually have a lot of memories of doing things that were fun. I think I have a lot of memories of sleeping late, but I have some memories of being out for drinks with people. But anyway, it was really just a 24-hour period each week. Now my experience was a little unique in that I was living with my now husband and even married for a bunch of graduate school, and then after, I think second year was more fun. I think more fun was actually had second year. I think maybe I had no memory of the actual fun, but I had less memory of just doing nothing but work.
Then when I was writing my actual dissertation, I had a baby and I should say, having a baby while you write your dissertation is a really good time to have a baby. It was a much easier time to have a baby than my second child that I had after I was out in the world trying to get research done and navigating a job. My schedule was my own. If I missed night's sleep, that meant I just had to figure out how to make that up and work harder and okay, I'm going to cancel whatever plans we had and the babysitter's got to watch my kid that much longer while I finish up this thing to give it to my advisor. Having a baby was very fun. I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Science and Industry. I was a member of the Museum of Science and Industry.
Kelly:
Oh, Paul and I have both done quite a bit of that as well with our own children.
Paul:
Yes, yes. Big open space. Middle of February, where are we going to go? It's cold. They go to the MSI. That's exactly right.
Wendy:
Yep. We spent a lot of time at the museum. I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store with my child. That was very fun. You know what was really fun, if you work late enough at the Reg, the cafe, I think that's an overstatement to call it a cafe. Could-
Paul:
It's a pretty good cafe now.
Wendy:
It is? Okay.
Paul:
I don't know what it was like when you were there, but yeah, they have a very nice cafe there now.
Wendy:
They put out the bagels and pastries that they didn't sell over the course of the day. They put them out at, I want to say 11 o'clock every night on a big tray, and that was very fun. We would all go down to the basement. We were already in the Reg. We would go down to the basement and wait for the tray of free food to be put out, and then we would all hang out together eating our 11:00 PM snack before going back upstairs to study more. It was fun. I have happy memories of that.
Kelly:
Wendy, is there anything that we didn't ask about that you would like to talk about?
Wendy:
One thing, I think my path has been very circuitous to get to where I am, and I didn't appreciate how possible that was to have a nonlinear path. Even getting into the PhD program and then post PhD, the examples that I looked at when I was getting PhD looked very linear to me. You get a job out of graduate school, it's at a really good place. You write a bunch of papers, you probably don't get tenure because you've gotten your first job at a really good place and they're not going to give you tenure, but then you have to leave that place after five years and go to a slightly worse place, but still a really good place and then you get tenure. I just thought that there was this one basic path and life is long and takes weird turns, and you go two steps forward and one step back and that is totally okay.
Paul:
I think that's a wonderful point to be able to end on, and it is actually one of the points that we really want people to take away from this entire podcast series, especially when it's students who are going to be listening to this podcast, is kind of recognizing, all right, there's not a linear path. There's not just one path that one can take with a PhD. There's not just one contribution that one can be making when they earn a PhD, and I really think our conversation today has highlighted that in a major way. So thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Wendy:
You are so welcome. It was a fun trip down memory lane. I mean a little triggering. It's okay. I'll get over it.
Kelly:
Thank you, Wendy.