Ray Madoff spends her weekends baking homemade sourdough bread, listening to audiobooks, or honing her developing squash skills. Offering a beginner bread recipe or two and scrolling through photos of the loaf of sourdough she baked for a friend, the former corporate lawyer and author’s days off are filled with passion projects like these, but her week days are spent pursuing her other passion—Ray Madoff works her nine to five teaching Boston College Law School students about corruption in charitable endeavors.

Like most interesting people in the world, Madoff’s professional journey has been a tumultuous one—marked by a transition from being a big-time corporate lawyer to a blossoming law professor to, finally, the brainy philanthropy expert she is today. After obtaining her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Brown University, Madoff became a tax lawyer, a career path she found predictable given her educational background.

“A friend of mine has a theory that all philosophy majors that go to law school become tax lawyers,” Madoff said.

Madoff’s analytical philosophy undergraduate background trained her to ask big questions—pondering the nature of goodness as a philosophy undergrad naturally led her to debate classic tax dilemmas, such as the nature of borrowing money as opposed to investing money. For nine years, Madoff exercised her analytical philosophy skills as a tax attorney before moving on to a job she was not nearly as prepared for: teaching at BC Law.