Caitlin E McIlwain

Proudest Moment: Taking a leap of faith to study abroad for an entire year!

Thesis: The Supply Side Responses to The Affordable Care Act

My name is Caitlin and I am an avid runner, aspiring economist, an Irish-American, and a lover of family, cats, pastries, public policy, and marathons (in that order). When I began my journey at UW, I knew I wanted to study economics to reach the end goal of becoming a stock broker on Wall Street. Little did I know that I would leave UW with an immense passion for public policy, and a goal of fighting "the good fight" by using my economics background (and hopefully a Master's in Public Policy) to do so. After taking a course on global challenges, I discovered that I wanted to use my economics background to build and analyze economics models that could explain how policy affects consumers, firms, and the economy. I tacked on an Applied Mathematics minor in order to give myself a more robust math background for whatever future path I follow.

During my time at UW, I experienced many successes: I have run five marathons (qualifying for the Boston Marathon four times, running it twice), I studied abroad at the world renowned London School of Economics for an entire year in an unaffiliated study abroad program, I surprised myself by my success in my mathematics courses, I found an new passion for creative writing, I wrote my Economics Departmental Honors Thesis on the Affordable Care Act, reinforcing my passion for Public Policy, and in August 2017, I accepted a full time job offer to work for EY doing economic analysis in the field of Transfer Pricing. But while at UW, I also grappled with uncertainty, fear of failure, the meaning behind my own privilege, global challenges, institutionalized marginalization, problematizing culture, challenging (and at the time, unsolvable) mathematics and economics problems, and my own self confidence. During these challenges, I am reminded of my support system that consists of my parents (and three little brothers at home), my very loyal dog (and not so loyal kitty), my friends who have seen me at my worst, my professors who have doubled as mentors, and my relationship with God which as grown immensely since I set foot on campus in 2014.

To quote T.S. Eliot, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Thus, I don't think of this as the end of something, but merely as the beginning.