[Excerpt] Age 51 is a bit early to be writing a retrospective about one's career as an economist and one's life. This is especially true for me since I am not on track to win a Nobel Prize, to be admitted to the National Academy of Science, or even to be elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Nonetheless, as I write this essay during the fall of 1997, I look back on the 28 years I have spent as a PhD economist and see a record of accomplishment of which I am proud and a number of messages worth conveying to budding economists. Moreover, because I became the Vice-President for Academic Programs, Planning and Budgeting at Cornell in the spring of 1995 and am unsure when, or if, I will return to the faculty, taking the time to sum up my career to date may well help me to decide the directions in which I want it to go in the future.