He chose real estate over the study of ancient texts.

AARON Lerner could have continued living a life of academic adventure by studying ancient texts and traveling to exotic locales. Instead, he returned to Los Angeles and took a job in his chosen profession, real estate.

He recently became an associate at real estate finance and investment brokerage Sonnenblick-Eichner Co.

Lerner is running financial analyses of five deals that will result in memorandums put out to bid for the issue of mortgage-backed securities, which pool loans and then sell them as bonds.

Lerner started out by competing in a national marketing program as a high school student in Houston. He was accepted to USC on a full scholarship, joining the real estate finance program.

"We did a lot of Harvard Business School cases, and a final development case with Newhall Land out in Valencia," he said. "We had a team, we took some people with the architecture school and came up with a development plan for a 10-acre site--a mixed-use town center, with retail on the bottom and residential on the top. We actually got to present it to senior management and they incorporated a lot of our ideas into what they actually did. It was really almost like real-life consulting."

But he had also studied Spanish at USC, and spent two semesters in Madrid. "I caught a little bit of a traveling bug," he said. So he applied and was accepted to a post-graduate program in Jerusalem that took him to Israel for two years studying ancient texts. "It was like going to law school," he said, "except all of the texts were in languages I didn't speak--Aramaic and ancient Hebrew." He also worked out the travel bug by visiting Italy, Greece and Egypt. Then, "I decided to come back and get into the real estate market."

He lives in West Los Angeles with his wife Rachel. He enjoys rock climbing, scuba diving and hiking.