Written by Doug Goodnough
Michael Farrell, ’17, is a man on the move. In fact, in his quest to combine his passion for economics with his professional career aspirations, he has traveled to places like Austria, London, Croatia, and Prague.
“I think I have had ten different addresses in the last ten years,” he said. “I haven’t really stayed in one place for too long.”
After graduating from Hillsdale College with his degree in economics, he spent a year in California working in financial business intelligence and as a sales engineer for SMAC Moving Coil Actuators. While there, he was training with the company’s electrical and mechanical engineers for an opportunity to work in Singapore. However, that eventually fell through due to his father’s cancer diagnosis.
When his father fell ill, he left his job in California and moved back to his home in North Carolina to care for his father.
“Since I was now in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was unemployed, I had a lot of friends from college in Washington, D.C.,” Farrell said. “So I went up and met with some of them.”
When his father’s health improved, Farrell moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where he worked a couple of jobs as a business intelligence analyst and IWMS (integrated workplace management system) software engineer for the Defense Health Agency and Definitive Logic, respectively. Originally, he was offered a scholarship from The Fund for American Studies to study global political economy at the University of Hong Kong in the summer of 2020. But then Hong Kong’s government proposed an extradition bill, which would allow criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China. This led to the functional annexation of Hong Kong by China and the premature end of many of the benefits of “one country, two systems.”
There were protests in Hong Kong in late 2019 and all of 2020, so his program was moved to the National University of Singapore for the summer of 2020. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in this 2020 program in Singapore being changed to remote study.
For a time, Farrell worked as a freelance data analyst and had the opportunity to study government and economics both in Prague and Croatia as part of The Fund for American Studies.
“There’s actually a former Hillsdale economics professor (Nikolai Wenzel) who was teaching the economics portion of the program,” Farrell said of the Croatia seminar. “That was a great educational opportunity to meet a lot of like-minded folks. It was a really tight-knit group.”
In August 2021, he took a position as a data quality analyst for the U.S. Department of State and is currently completing his third year there. He has led a team that worked with satellite images of different real estate properties to assist U.S. embassies and consulates. He also works on modernizing the technology within the Department of State.
He has continued to get opportunities to travel and study overseas and has been to London for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. In fact, he has pondered entering the Foreign Service, and with a special zest for Mandarin economics, one of his potential goals is to be the U.S. ambassador to China.
The study of economics that attracted him to Hillsdale has him continuing those pursuits wherever his travels take him. He has joined seminars and workshops with an economics focus on faculty and graduate students at universities like Duke and George Mason. He also serves on the steering committee of the American Institute for Economic Research’s Bastiat Society of Raleigh with two Duke economists. Farrell said Hillsdale College’s inaugural Center for Commerce and Freedom Conference featuring Nobel Prize Laureate Vernon Smith was a nice opportunity to visit campus.
“I loved being on campus and getting to see the new Christ Chapel,” said Farrell, whose favorite architect is Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whom he discovered at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the summer of 2022. “And I love the Latin inscriptions they have on the ceilings.”
Captain of an ultimate frisbee team well as president of the esports club during his time as a Hillsdale student, he called an intimate Austrian economics course with Dr. Charles Steele “transformative.”
“After that course, there were clear changes in the way I thought and just my general view of the world,” Farrell said.
He said eventually returning to the classroom as an economics professor at a small liberal arts college is an option, but he admits he does not know what his future holds.
“I say it’s like a 50 percent chance I’ll move somewhere else soon,” Farrell said. “I always expect that 80 percent of my plans are going to turn out differently from what I anticipate.”
Banner image courtesy of Christian Lue.
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in April 2024
