Spotlighted Student: Gabriel Rybeck '16

Finding his way to Haverford College was straightforward for Gabriel Rybeck ’16. He comes from a legacy of alumni; Aunt Ellen Brodsky ’85, Uncle Ted Rybeck ’85, and second cousin Rick Rybeck ’78.

When it came time to look at colleges, Haverford was on the top of the list. The Honor Code gave Haverford a uniqueness that intrigued him, the campus was inviting and comfortable, and the academics aligned with his curricular aspirations.

He was interested in Mathematics and Economics during his high schools years in Rockville, Maryland, but had little exposure to other interests of his, like Computer Science. Haverford has supported him in exploring his broad academic interests. As a result, he will matriculate with a double major in Economics and Computer Science with a Mathematical Economics Concentration.

His thesis is a culmination of his time at Haverford, as it spans Economics and Computer Science and focuses on the aspects of each field that most interests him. His topic aims at explaining potential adverse effects in price discrimination. Price discrimination is the concept that under certain conditions firms are able to increase their profits by charging segments of the market individualized prices rather than a uniform price. This pricing strategy can come in one of three degrees: first degree price discrimination in which sellers perfectly charge consumers their willingness to pay; second degree price discrimination in which sellers set up price tiers into which customers sort themselves (e.g. through coupons); or third degree price discrimination in which sellers set up price tiers into which customers are sorted via external factors (e.g. through student vs. adult movie tickets, or geographic pricing).

Gabe’s thesis asks if there are certain communities unfairly affected in cases of this third degree price discrimination. Studies in the past year have revealed that many online sellers that were thought to charge uniform prices, in reality price goods differently depending on where consumers are located, what they click on, how many times they click, etc. In light of how much online information firms are able to obtain on individual consumers, he highlights how firms are poised to use machine learning methods to determine a pricing strategy based on these large sets of customer attributes. Often the public and even the firm itself is blind to what attributes play what role in the pricing strategy. Gabe’s research will look at one example of such a pricing strategy, break down the influence of various attributes on price, and identify if racial attributes were used explicitly or implicitly in the pricing algorithm.

Gabe felt drawn to the Computer Science major after a project for the Data Structures course in which he developed a card game app. Similarly, Gabe felt drawn to the Economics major because of a project in Professor Richard Ball’s Economic Statistics with Calculus course. His work in this project, looking at what factors effect crime rates, introduced him to the breadth of economic literature and the power of econometrics. Another course that he found pivotal to his college career was Bryn Mawr’s mathematics class Real Analysis I, which encouraged him to do the math-econ concentration.

Currently he is taking a graduate course in University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school called ‘Machine Learning’. It is a course that brings together the statistical methods, linear algebra, and algorithms work that he had done at Haverford. He is enjoying applying what he is learning to his thesis and to other topics in economics.

Gabe has spent his summers in a variety of ways. After freshman year, he worked for Haverford’s ‘Summer Programs’ office, which allowed him to get to know the campus in whole new way.                                            

After his sophomore year he worked at a Cambridge, Massachusetts tech start-up in the content management system business, Bluetrain.io. He collaborated with the team in generating an online tool for potential customers to get feedback on their website, ultimately in order to encourage them to consider what Bluetrain’s content management system could do for their website.

Last summer, Gabe worked at Exelon in Kennett Square, PA. Exelon is a U.S. power generator company that supplies power to more than 2.5 million residential, public sector and business customers. Gabe was a project manager for their “emerging technologies” division. He was a part of projects ranging from the implementation of a big data analytics platform to building educational tools on efficient home power use. He feels lucky that he got to see the inner workings of the complex energy industry—the economics and the engineering.  

Since freshman year Gabe has played on the Ultimate Frisbee team and has been a leader for the Lame Ducks, Haverford’s ice-hockey club team. He is also a campus tour guide.

Gabe is interested in pursuing a career in data science. As well, he is enthusiastic about jobs in the software engineering world and consulting world.