Different ways of helping people — Stephen Lich teaches economics and fights fire

Students can find economics professor Stephen Lich lecturing in Murphey Hall on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. At other times, Lich can be found fighting fires in rural Orange County. 

In addition to working as a senior lecturer in the economics department and helping part time with advising, Lich is a volunteer firefighter with the Orange Grove Volunteer Fire Company. 

“With both teaching and the fire stuff, it’s a matter of helping people with different things,” he said.

Since the fire company uses an on-call volunteer system, Lich carries around a pager he refers to as his "Batphone." When he is not lecturing, Lich is ready to take a call at any time.

Lich said he became a volunteer firefighter after receiving a suggestion from his neighbor and has continued to volunteer because he likes doing hands-on work.

“If there’s one thing that really summarizes it and sort of my worldview is that I want to try to help out,” he said. “I don’t think I can save the world, so if I can just find one person who is having a bad day and try and make it a little bit less bad, I am satisfied.”

He said he sees the benefits of using volunteer firefighters to help with changing demand for staff, but he said he can’t help but notice aspects of the fire job that are at odds with the economist perspective.

“So I teach statistics and one of the strange things is that when we have a fire call, it’s always you’re getting geared up like this is it, this is the big one,” he said.

“You might’ve been called out to this place for 20 false alarms in the past week, but the twenty-first time you get paged out you’ve got to be like this is it for sure, until you get there and you find out this is nothing.”

At UNC, his favorite class to teach is econometrics — a class he said is centered on research.

“I like teaching people to do research,” Lich said. “Teaching them if they have a question, hey, you don’t have to sit around in the dark, you can go out and grab some data and answer your question.”

Senior Ariana Vaisey, a former student of Lich’s, said she took multiple classes with Lich because he is funny and does things to keep the attention of the class. 

“To try and help us understand how you define categories when you’re creating statistics, he ended up eating a handful of Crisco in front of the whole class,” she said. “He was explaining how you would never define food that both is bad for you and tastes bad as food.” 

Rita Balaban, another senior lecturer in the economics department, said she admires Lich’s dedication to his students. 

“He sees deeper into students than I think most people would,” she said. “In terms of where I might read a student’s problem as okay, that’s part of college life, he sees it as more serious in terms of there’s underlying issues for things like that.”

Lich cares for the people around him when he's fighting fires, too. He said one of the most rewarding aspects of working with the fire company is the sense of community it has provided.

“You do just start to know each corner of your neighborhood,” he said. “You just start to know these things and get to know your neighbors one emergency at a time.”

@natalieaconti

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