Have you been following the developments of President-elect Obama’s Cabinet? I have. Recently Obama announced who will be in his economic team, the people who will have to get us out the immeasurably deep hole we are all sitting in. The new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, will have the Herculean task of orchestrating the bailout and whatever stimulus package Obama will be giving us (The New York Times reports).
Timothy Geithner is the relatively young president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as you might know has been the, “primary engineer of the government’s response to the recent financial meltdown.” But did you know that his childhood was spent all over the world, including in Zimbabwe, India and Thailand?
When he went to Dartmouth for his undergraduate degree, class of 1983, he had a double major in government and Asian studies along with a concentration in Chinese. While he was at Dartmouth he even worked as a Chinese language drill instructor, was reportedly a very good speaker of the language, and studied abroad in Beijing. An Asian studies major? Chinese instructor? I had no idea! My mom will be happy to hear that my choice of undergraduate major means I’m in good company. If you want to learn more you should definitely read this article from The Dartmouth.
This all makes me wonder, what other famous people were Asian studies majors while in college? I do know that the actor Edward Norton majored in Asian history and minored in Japanese at Yale (short biography here). I learned that little fact in the summer of 2005 while living in Beijing, where I was offered the job of being Mr. Norton’s stand-in, the guy who stands in for the actor while camera operators take light readings, for the filming of the movie The Painted Veil, a historical drama that takes place in China during the Chinese civil war. Other than these two men I’m at a loss for what other famous people studied Asian studies.
