I was an economics major in college, and every summer after school, I would drive my car from California, from Claremont men's college at the time, to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.
The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor. It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money.
My most lucrative job in college was a stint as the regional Dodge Girl.
I had three jobs my junior and senior year of high school. I worked for the gas station and worked for a pizza place.
It was great to go to Stanford. Until that point, I'd spent my whole life in southeast Michigan, working for General Motors. I was in a different part of the country. People didn't know what General Motors was, didn't care, or if they did, they might not have had a favorable impression. I saw people driving nondomestic vehicles.
I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn't set out to be a businessperson.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
I wanted to find something I was passionate about, something with the possibility of upward movement, and I wanted freedom. I need to be outside living life, not stuck in an office. I figured I could either be out selling condos in Miami, or I could move to L.A. and chase after that elusive actor's job.
I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.
After college, I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would come in, and they'd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their coats off. They'd tell me, 'Two,' and I'd put two lumps of sugar in their coffee.