“My name is Madeline Kalista and I come from Chicago, Illinois. I previously attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and obtained my bachelor’s and master’s in Accounting there. Upon graduating I began working in the public accounting sector for a firm in Chicago. After spending a little over a year there, I decided I wanted to get away from the scenery of Chicago, it all felt too familiar. So, I transferred from Chicago to Dublin, Ireland, and spent a year working as an accountant there. I learned a lot of things in my time as an accountant, one of them being that I didn’t actually want to pursue accounting as my life long career. It was then I began looking around for other programmes that might interest me.
I had been to Vienna before, and only had good memories there so the University of Vienna was one of the universities I decided to explore. I found the master’s programme in Philosophy and Economics and was immediately drawn to it; it combined some of the principles I was already familiar with, with an exciting new subject area for me (philosophy).
The programme so far has not been a disappointment! My colleagues are motivated and kind, and we have become our own little philosophy and economics community. There are people with a variety of backgrounds which make for interesting discussions and I am learning something new every day.
As the majority of classes I am taking are philosophy classes, most of my days are spent reading, which is fine by me. I have class every day of the week and for each class it is usually required to prepare some questions about the text that was assigned. These assignments are what take up most of my time, but the good part is they are always interesting and as far as homework goes, not too painful.
Philosophy and economics have more in common than one might think and learning at the cross section of these two disciplines is learning how to train your brain to two systems at once. As I am in my first semester of the programme I don’t quite know where I’ll head after graduation, but I know I’ll have learned quite a bit by the time I get there.” – Madeline Kalista
Madeline studies Philosophy and Economics at the University of Vienna.
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