Tobacman Moves from Eliot to Indonesia, PBHA to HIID

For someone who's about to finish four years of studying physics and move to Indonesia to work with local banks, Jeremy B. Tobacman '99 seems surprisingly unfazed by graduation.

"It doesn't feel real because afterwards I don't think that my life is going to change that much," says the senior from Iowa City, Iowa, who recently received a Rockefeller Fellowship to support a year in Southeast Asia.

Indeed, Tobacman may be switching from quantum mechanics to community banking and moving from Eliot House to Indonesia, but he won't be going through any drastic changes.

Over the past four years Tobacman studied physics while spending his spare time working in homeless shelters and doing research for a professor in the economics department. Though a seemingly eclectic college career, it is one that flows naturally into his work in Indonesia.

Since the summer after his first year, Tobacman has worked with Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy David I. Laibson.

He began by summarizing journal articles and eventually worked with Laibson to plan and develop a computer program that simulates the economic behavior of populations.

Tobacman says this interest in understanding economic behavior is one of the reasons he is heading to Indonesia. He plans to spend at least part of his year studying a group of banks that is particularly responsive to its community and demonstrates an excellent knowledge of community behavior patterns.

Tobacman plans to enter graduate school in economics when he returns from Indonesia. He currently has offers from Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Chicago.

But academic research and coursework were not Tobacman's only priorities during the last four years.

During his time at Harvard, Tobacman spent two summers working at the St. James Homeless Shelter in Cambridge and many spare hours during the academic year working at the University Lutheran Homeless Shelter. The experience seems to have had a profound impact on his thinking.

"My time there gave me insight into how vivid everybody's story is," he says. "Sometimes we forget the different kinds of things that can lead people to a point in life. We judge just based on what we observe."

So far, Tobacman's only concrete plans for next year involve his work studying banks. Still, there is every indication that his altruistic instincts will help shape his year in Indonesia.

"I am dedicated to doing something that really matters to the people there," he says. "I certainly want to make sure that while I'm there I'm not just in an office."

Moreover, it seems that Jeremy Tobacman the public servant has a strong influence on the choices being made by Jeremy Tobacman the academic.

Explaining why he wants to leave physics for a career in economics, Tobacman says, "I think economics as an academic discipline more adequately addresses problems that matter on a daily basis than physics."

"I think of economics as a field that has a lot of important things to say about the world in terms of what is true and what we can do to help make people's lives better."

Into Indonesia

Indonesia's troubled economy has attracted plenty of attention in recent months as Western economists have tried to keep the Asian financial crisis from becoming a global recession.

But Tobacman says his work will not be focused on these broader issues.

The research he plans to conduct--like the work he continues to do for Laibson--is strictly microeconomics.

Instead of looking at the Indonesian economy as a whole, or how the Indonesian economy affects other economies, Tobacman will focus his work on interactions between banks and their customers.

He will begin his year working for the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). There he will help Bank Bakayat--a uniquely structured Indonesian bank comprised of a series of small "village banks"--determine what practices are most successful for its local banks.

Tobacman says the village banks provide an unusual level of intimacy between the customer and the bank.

"The village banks are interesting for how they very carefully design their programs with the knowledge of human behavior and psychology," he says. "People who work in the banks are very in touch with the people who take loans."

Tobacman adds that the village banks' effort to understand their customers' behavior is similar to Laibson's effort to model economic behavior.

"His research program broadly is all about trying to understand human behavior better and translate this understanding of human behavior into economic models which formalize behaviors and generate testable predictions," Tobacman explains.

But Tobacman does not plan on spending his whole year working at HIID.

"The work with HIID is a chance to contribute to a project that is meaningful and to get my feet on the ground," he says.

Tobacman is trying to figure out how to be sure that his work in Indonesia, like his work in the homeless shelters, has a direct impact on people. One option he's considering is working at a local branch of Bank Bakayat.

"I see [Bakayat] not just as an economic, profit seeking institution, but also as one that has enormous benefit for people who use the service," he says.

Of course, Tobacman's motives in Indonesia are not all altruistic or career-related. More simply, he says, the trip is also about getting to know himself.

"I really am interested in learning about how I personally react to being in such a different environment," he says. "There's an element of personal exploration."

Becoming a Cantab

Cambridge may be a long way from Iowa, but he says he had little problem adjusting to life at Harvard.

"I jumped right in," he says.

His first year Tobacman was very busy, taking five classes and rowing freshman crew. That summer he began research with Laibson.

And over the past four years, Tobacman has become so well-adjusted that he prefers Cambridge to the "delightful safety" of Iowa City where he worries of growing "complacent."

"I think it's unlikely that I will live in Iowa for a substantial portion of my life," he says, noting that it's very likely he will be back in Cambridge for graduate school. "I expect that the people who excite me most will be in other places."

Tobacman is also very clear about the way he has changed since moving to the East Coast, though he says it's hard to know what is simply a result of growing up and what is a result of four years at Harvard.

"I've become much more aware since I've been here," he says. "Before I came here I wasn't judgmental. Now I'm able to detect more nuances about the way people are thinking and feeling."

"Also, I've come to ask better questions--questions about an academic field, questions about what's going on in the news, questions that are relevant to my friends."

But while Tobacman can isolate specific changes he has gone through during his four years in Cambridge, he says he can't isolate the specific aspects of his life at Harvard that have been most critical to those changes.

"It's hard for me to imagine who I would be now without my friends, without the time at the shelter, without the research, without my classes, and probably without having lived in Eliot House," he says.