The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy. Every year, a national debating topic is chosen. (One year, it was the reform of the agricultural support programs, an issue which I had to grapple with almost forty years later; some of my colleagues in the Clinton Administration too had been debaters, but they got taken up by the sport. I was attracted more by the ideas.) In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue - it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.