Growing up in the Boston suburb of Mansfield, Massachusetts, Nick DeMassi developed an early love of the outdoors and a strong sense of community involvement. Perhaps it’s natural that he joined the Boy Scouts, where he completed service stints in Minnesota, New Mexico and West Virginia as a member of the Scouting National Honors Society. He built a footbridge at a local land preserve for his Eagle project.

“When I started my college search I was looking for a culture that was friendly to being adventurous and independent,” he said.

He found it at UVM, where he will graduate this spring with a double major in economics and political science and a minor in math. After graduation, he’ll join the Peace Corps to teach math to students in Guinea, Africa.

DeMassi was accepted at a large Canadian university and a smaller independent college in Vermont, but UVM seemed the best fit.

“I was traveling with my grandparents on vacation when we visited Burlington and they said ‘let’s check out this school.’ I remember getting the feeling this was the college I was dreaming about. I felt like I wouldn’t just be a number here.”

Initially, DeMassi declared chemistry as a major, a subject he excelled at in high school. At UVM, he discovered another outlet for his facility with numbers.

“One of my friends pointed out that there’s a whole other world—that economics was a way to apply math. I took economics courses and I shifted from hard science to studying people and the economy.”

What sealed the deal were the informal review sessions he conducted for fellow students in a microeconomics course taught by professor Ross Thomson.

“I figured if I’m tutoring it I must be good at it,” he said.

DeMassi served as a teaching assistant for another of his UVM mentors, associate professor of economics Sara Solnick, who is also serving as his Honors College thesis advisor. His research involves a new take on the “ultimatum game,” a classic experiment that provides insights into how humans calculate their economic self-interest.

“In the past, the experiment has been controlled for gender—showing how men and women make different decisions,” he explains. “But no one has controlled the game for sexual orientation so that’s what I’m looking at now.”

To fund his thesis project, DeMassi received some help from the College of Arts and Sciences through an APLE research grant. The APLE program supports up to 24 undergraduate research projects in the College each year.

He’s also developed leadership skills working as a resident assistant in a University Heights residence hall, and serving as a UVM orientation leader.

DeMassi believes graduate school is in his future, but he is also dedicated to the ideal of using his education to help others. Through a job shadowing program managed by the UVM Career Center he visited a small financial management firm in Burlington and a larger operation in Boston, and he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a personal financial planner.

“It was exposure to two different ways of money management. As good as I am with numbers, I like the person-to-person aspect of the business—helping people make big life decisions like planning for college and retirement.”

For now, he’s looking forward to his two-year Peace Corps stint in Africa.

“I feel basically fluent in French, which is the national language in Guinea. I’m brushing up on my conversation skills through Skype sessions with a friend in Quebec. Of course I don’t have a complete picture, but I’m excited to apply some of the skills I have in another country.”