VT College of Science Magazine Annual 2014 | Page 12

Beating the odds
G

rowing up in a subdivision next to a farm presented future economist Sheryl Ball with a
host of opportunities to be an entrepreneur at a young age. In a small neighborhood in
St. Louis County, Ball spent a lot of her time in elementary and middle school raising chickens on her neighbor’s farm in return for her help milking cows on Sunday morning.
Picking up eggs and delivering them around the neighborhood sounds almost Rockwell-esque, and Ball recalled “babysitting was never as interesting as that. But after three years raccoons broke in and ate all the
chickens and I took it as a sign to try something else.”
For Ball, however, trying something new meant doing much of the work herself. “My high school counselors
were disastrous,” she said. “Very few students went to college from my school and to come up with a statistic
they could brag about, they talked about the number of people who ‘sought education’ after high school –
everything from going to beauty school to joining the military. In 1980 if there was training involved, they
counted it. There was no real mission to help students get into prestigious colleges and no one seemed
to understand why anyone would want to leave Missouri to find a good university.”
Fortunately, she had people other than guidance counselors to help her, including her mother, who was a social worker, and her father, who was a chemical engineer. “In my junior
year of high school my father and I met with my counselor and my dad was concerned we
had trouble with math teachers in the department not really knowing math. My father
was concerned that I would be taking calculus my senior year and the teachers weren’t
that good. My counselor actually told my father he didn’t know what calculus was
and had to look it up in a dictionary. He said, ‘It sounds like a class everyone should
take, but I’m not sure why it’s offered by the math \\