Mauri Hall

Background

About Mauri Hall

ABOUT ME I’ve lived many lives—recording artist, record producer, rigger, educator, coder, economist—but the through line has always been this: I figure things out. I was born in Alberta and raised in Tobago. My high school taught algebra, but not statistics—so I taught myself. Nights and weekends with Khan Academy became my classroom. That was the first time I realized how much I could learn on my own if I really wanted to. It wouldn't be the last. In my early twenties, I built and ran a music studio in Trinidad and Tobago. I worked with some of the biggest names in soca—Machel Montano, Bunji Garlin—producing tracks that reached audiences across the Caribbean and beyond. But after a few years, I felt the industry was stagnant, creatively and economically. I left it all behind and moved to Toronto. I spent a year working rigging jobs—hard, physical work—during the day, and finished high school at night. Then I enrolled at Acadia University in Nova Scotia for a year before transferring to Wilfrid Laurier University, where I earned a Bachelor’s in Economics with a minor in Mathematics. From there, I pursued my Master’s and PhD in Economics at York University, focusing on financial econometrics and time series modeling. My doctoral work focused on an area of time series modeling that was as yet unexplored: mixed causal and noncausal VAR models—a class of models particularly useful in dealing with time series that don’t follow the rules of Gaussian error terms. During my PhD I began teaching and found that I enjoyed connecting with students at least as much as I enjoyed research. Then COVID hit. My father passed away during the pandemic. I wasn’t able to attend the funeral since there was no way to travel to Trinidad at the time. A few years later, I finished my dissertation. One day before my PhD defense, my mother passed away. I defended anyway. My dissertation was accepted without revisions. Eventually, I got an job offer with John Abbott College in Montreal. I gladly accepted and I’ve been teaching there ever since. WHAT I DO NOW I enjoy teaching economics and statistics to CEGEP students. I build models, write Python packages, day trade, and consult. I still dream big—about trading systems, research breakthroughs, and building educational tools and student-teacher relationships that open doors for people like me who weren’t handed a clear path. I’ve made peace with the nonlinear nature of my story. It’s what makes me valuable. As much as I care about the income for a given job or project, I’m even more interested in the outcome.