Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair, once interviewed herself for her high school newspaper. She was its editor-in-chief and school valedictorian.
“Next year I will attend Pembroke College where I’ve decided to major in math or anthropology or economics,” the 1963 graduating senior said in her own interview. She later discovered her passion in economics, and might now become the first woman in what Business Insider called “most powerful policy-making role in the world.”
Business Insider found evidence of Yellen’s curiosity and imperturbability in her role as editor-in-chief of The Pilot, the student newspaper of Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn.
She joined The Brown Daily Herald‘s business desk as a freshman at Pembroke College, which was then the women’s college of Brown University. Even though her journalism career ended there, she continued to see public communication as vital to ensuring the success of policy changes.
“I hope to show how communication plays a distinct and special role in monetary policymaking,” she told a gathering of business reporters and editors at the SABEW conference in April. “The effects of monetary policy depend critically on the public getting the message about what policy will do months or years in the future.”
Yellen was first nominated to the Fed’s board by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and has served as vice chairwoman since 2010. She has an extraordinary track record of predicting economic change and influencing the Fed’s decisions in previous decades, leading Bloomberg to say that perhaps “Yellen has already become the most powerful woman in history”