Cultivating interests and some of my favorite books from undergrad - Brett Mullins – Researcher - Data Scientist

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June 18, 2026 |

15 minutes to read

Cultivating interests and some of my favorite books from undergrad

At the close of the spring semester, I spent a bit of time advising students on the near-term: which classes to choose for the fall, how to prepare for graduate school, ideas for things to do over the summer, etc. During these discussions, I like to ask students about their interests. Most of the time, they don’t know. If they have an answer, it’s often something trendy, e.g., NLP or AI. Either case is fine; I didn’t really have an answer initially when I was in their shoes.

Occasionally, a student will name a course they’ve enjoyed. Here are some of my stock responses. Was it that the professor was interesting? Or the problems seemed cool? That it just clicked? That it tied things together from other classes? Most importantly: have you followed up on it?

Georgia State library (fifth floor) as I remember it

Cultivating interests is an often neglected part of the undergraduate experience. Perhaps, this is because it seems like something that should occur naturally and passively as one goes through their coursework. Often, building an interest starts in the classroom but continues as students explore new ideas, face new problems, and build new things. Actively cultivating one’s interests is a skill that’s developed over time and is often a pathway to attaining mastery.

For me, cultivating interests came through reading and engaging with books. I was fortunate to have several professors willing (and often excited) to recommend books and papers and who took the time to chat about random stuff I came across in the library. I try to pay this forward with my students by always having recommendations handy. Here are some of my favorite books from undergrad that helped me first cultivate my interests. I bring these up a lot but have never written about them in detail. I hope this serves as a useful resource for students looking to build their interests.

background

In undergrad, I essentially completed a build-your-own degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. PPE as an interdisciplinary major was not as prevalent as it is today. The bulk of my coursework was in economics and philosophy but shifted toward logic, mathematics, and statistics at the end. I quickly learned that I didn’t have the tools to rigorously tackle the sort of questions I wanted to answer.

The books below are grouped roughly into three categories: histories of philosophy and economics, PPE and political philosophy, and analytic philosophy.

histories of philosophy and economics

The first year courses in philosophy and economics really clicked for me. It was 2009 at the tail end of the financial crisis and interesting questions about the financial system, macroeconomic models, and the foundations of economics were in the air. While I enjoyed building economic intuition in my principles and intermediate courses, it was unsatisfying that the ideas and models were presented in a vacuum, more-or-less as laws of nature. This approach seems reasonable for comparative advantage and (probably) diminishing marginal utility but is much less clear for something like the steady state in the Solow growth model.

Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers (1953) is a lively history of political economy built around the big names and was exactly the sort of book I was looking for (or so I thought). Much of it was surprising! I had no idea how much of the introductory material could be found in Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Or that marginalism was such a big deal in economic theory in the late nineteenth century. Or that Keynes was such an odd character yet such a wide-ranging thinker. While exciting, this book felt far removed from the economics I saw in my courses. It is mired in mid-twentieth century debates about the merits of capitalism and socialism, which can be misleading to an impressionable reader today. Still, it provided a useful historical perspective and made me excited for later courses.

After reading Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy in an intro course, I stumbled across his voluminous History of Western Philosophy (1945) in a used book store and became engrossed in it like no other. This book is a sweeping history of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the early twentieth century. Russell’s writing is witty and warm, transforming what could have been an episodic slog into a compelling narrative. This book deservedly receives a lot of criticism for various inaccuracies and biases. I’ve heard it disparagingly called “the History of Western Philosophy according to Bertrand Russell”. Despite these issues, I recommend it as an engaging (if limited) perspective on philosophy and the broader history of ideas.

ppe and political philosophy

I became drawn to the interplay between...