Senior Profile | Audrey Cheng
The Nexus of Econ, Law and Piano For her numerous accolades in music and economics, Audrey Cheng’s greatest strength is her unwavering commitment to finding true purpose, even if that means getting a little lost along the way. —Rebecca Picciotto ’22 Audrey Cheng ’20 has been playing the piano since she was five years old. In a parallel universe, her musical talent and passion would have naturally led her to a music conservatory where she would have lived and breathed the likes of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Amherst’s Orchestra Director Mark Swanson believes she would have been “a star at any of the top music schools, had she chosen that career path.” But in this universe, Cheng ended up at Amherst, studying economics and music. Upon graduation, she will conduct research on tax policy as a pre-doctoral fellow at Yale Law School for one year and then continue to Harvard Law School for her J.D. Where these two universes diverged might puzzle the outsider. How does a concert pianist end up Harvard Law-bound? But when you get to know Audrey Cheng, it just makes sense.
The First Lesson Cheng grew up in the city of Sunnyvale of California’s Bay Area, where she has been sheltered-in-place for the past three months with her parents and sister. Though she vaguely remembers some parts of her early childhood, her memory immediately sharpens when she recounts her life at five years old, the year she took her first piano lesson. Her instructor had her
clap out rhythms, and each time she clapped a rhythm correctly, she got a sticker on the back of her hand. She left that lesson with sticker-covered hands and a single thought: “I want to start practicing now.” But in late elementary school and early middle school, Cheng’s piano interest lulled. She began to take up other hobbies. She joined the middle school basketball team (going on to play varsity in high school) and later picked up an interest in street photography. It was only when she decided to go to a piano camp on a whim that her spark for music reignited. The other campers were older and more experienced than Cheng. “That really widened my view of how much more I had to learn and what the possibilities were,” she reflected. From then on, Cheng’s passion for piano was sustained by a simple yet empowering idea: “The more you practice, the more beautiful music comes out of your fingers.”
A New Love in Econ Before college, Cheng wasn’t sure that she really liked school. Cheng graduated from Homestead High School, a public school in Santa Clara County, California. In high school, she took classes and got good grades but never grasped exactly “why [school] matters.” There was one course at Homestead High School that
14 | The Amherst Student | May 31, 2020
she loved though: AP Literature. It was a notoriously difficult class that students often avoided. The result was a small, self-selected group of invested students along with a teacher who knew how to lead engaging discussions. In that small academic environment, Cheng found a sense of community that she had only ever experienced while learning piano. As she applied to college, her AP Lit classroom remained in the back of her mind. Amherst was thus a natural fit. Arriving in the Pioneer Valley for the first time, this Californian thought, “I was discovering a whole new world. [There were] all these people to get to know and all these buildings to get to explore.” As she settled into her Stearns one-room double, Cheng had some assumptions about who she would be in college. But as is the case with many firstyear preconceptions, she turned out to be wrong. Cheng was pretty sure she was going to focus more on academics and less on piano. Then, she auditioned for orchestra. Before she knew it, she was happily embroiled in the Amherst music scene as a pianist and a flutist and became an indispensable part of it, later chosen to be president of the Amherst Symphony Orchestra (ASO). But Cheng contributed more than just her musical talent. Swanson noted that her “kindness, warmth, ebullience, joy
Photo courtesy of Audrey Cheng ’20
Amid figuring out her place in the world, Audrey Cheng ‘20 has made meaningful contributions in academics and music. and commitment to community has contributed an incalculable amount to the ASO’s social identity and cohesion.” Cheng had another incorrect pre-college hypothesis: she was pretty sure she would be an English major. Then, she took her first economics class. It was Introduction to Economics with Environmental Applications taught by Professor Katharine Sims, the chair of economicss and associate professor of economics and environmental studies, who would hire Cheng as a research assistant the next year and eventually become her thesis advisor. In economics, Cheng found a new love. “[There is] something about studying econ,” Cheng explained, “[From] how the examples apply to how we can incentivize human behavior to do the optimal things for policy reasons, [it] is very empowering knowledge to have.”
A Sophomore Summer Slump Sonata Following the high of the first years of college, Cheng felt a sophomore slump in enthusiasm, which became most prominent in the summer after her second year. She was completing a legal internship with the Prosecutor’s Office of the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Springfield, Massachusetts while simultaneously studying for the LSATs. She was the most burnt out that she had ever been in college. On the way to a restaurant one day with the other interns, Cheng stared out the window of the car while her boss pointed out the different businesses that he had prosecuted. Some had tried to launder money. Others were involved with drug trafficking. “All these people are just born here and didn’t have any other
