BDIC was always in the back of Katherine Widrow’s mind. She’s the 20th member of her family to attend UMass Amherst, and many of her relatives were BDIC majors in the seventies and eighties, “all the way back to the beginning of the program.”
Still, Widrow was intent on majoring in psychology. Having grown up with a visual impairment, she participated in many clinical trials. “I was really interested in that process because it was how I got diagnosed and I was seeing doctors a lot right around the college application process,” she explains. “I wanted to help people in a similar way,” she says, which attracted her to the clinical aspects of psychology.
However, when she participated in an exploratory fellowship at Fidelity Investments before starting at UMass, the experience changed her academic plans. “I just sort of kept raising my hand,” she remembers. “I asked ‘Where does psychology fall into all this?’ My eyes were opened because everybody said psychology has a huge place in business.” The fellowship sparked a love of business in Widrow, and eventually, she turned to BDIC to design a major that combined skills in finance, an understanding of people through psychology, and a deep knowledge of economics.
Learn more about how Katherine and other students customized their UMass Amherst experience by designing their own majors through BDIC.