Better Know a LeBow Student: Eric Horton

Graduating senior Eric Horton has the typical LeBow College of Business success story: After studying classical viola at a music conservatory for 18 months and then concentrating his early college career on courses in philosophy and political science, he decided economics was the right major for him.

Oh, and he never went on a co-op.

However he got to his graduation day, his choices were good ones: Eric is spending the next two years working as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. And he’s already thinking about pursuing a PhD and a career in the economics professoriate.

“It takes a certain type of person to pursue a career in music,” Eric says. “I wasn’t as full of passion as I had thought, or maybe not as talented as I thought I should be. And anyway, I missed studying academic areas other than music.”

Friends who already were Drexel students convinced Eric that the University’s emphasis on learning by doing was the perfect corrective for finding a non-music career. They were thinking co-op; he discovered opportunities to help philosophy and economics faculty with their research. In his exposure to economics, Eric found a discipline that connected philosophy and political science to public policy.

“Economics is so interdisciplinary, it seemed like a really interesting way to apply political science and philosophy,” he says. And as is true for many musicians, “I like studying math. I have good quantitative skills.”

For the next two years, Eric will be a research assistant in the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs, working on analyses to support the Federal Open Market Committee in its conduct of monetary policy, especially in the areas of finance, money and banking. It’s sort of like a post-graduate, two-year co-op, he says.

And DC-based music conductors take note: Eric was a member of the Drexel University Orchestra and played in a chamber music quartet at the University of Pennsylvania. He even audited a course in conducting, and he could be yours. Well, for the next two years, anyway.