So where were the spiders?

Warning: this post is even more boring than usual.

The trimester got underway in a flurry of room confusion. Having one lecture per course per week tends to make one a bit set in one's ways. After 12 weeks of going to the same cold, dark seminar room on Friday mornings, suddenly finding oneself there an hour later on Tuesday morning is a bit disconcerting.

Micro is in the Metrics/Growth room. Modelling is in the Macro room. Metrics is still in the same room. There's nothing in the Micro room (this was surely predictable, as it's my favourite seminar room), and Macro is in a ridiculously huge room which I've never been in before. You have to go upstairs from the Honours room to reach it. It's all so confusing.

This trimester looks to be light on assignments, heavy on reading, and totally free of textbooks (yay!). I may as well summarise my week in statistics, since I couldn't be bothered blogging after each lecture.

• Micro: Monday morning. Two assignments, one exam. Eight people (we've gained three!), three girls. Lectured by the non-mathematically-minded Dr C Micro for the first six weeks, then back to Dr A Micro for the rest of the year.
• Modelling: Tuesday morning. Two assignments, one essay, one exam; ten people, six girls (female outnumbering male for the first time this year). Lectured by an adjunct, who I shall call Dr Modelling, for the first four weeks. After that most of the course is lectured by Prof Modelling, who happens to be the same person as Prof A Macro from last trimester. There may or may not be a guest lecture later in the trimester.
• Metrics: very early Thursday morning, but Prof Metrics has declared that we shall start at 9am rather than 8.30 from now on, so that's a small improvement. One test, one exam. Unknown number of assignments, not counted for assessment. Seven people, three girls. So far as I can tell, they are the same seven people who got As in first-half Metrics. It's nice to be lectured by a professor, but he declared early on that he doesn't specialise in the one thing I really want to learn about (time-series econometrics), which is a bit disappointing. There's only one lecturer for this course.
• Macro: Thursday afternoon. Scheduled to finish at 5.30, but actually expected to finish at 4.30, according to Dr C Macro. (This means my Thursdays have shrunk to a manageable size - yay!) One report, one assignment, one exam; 14 people, eight girls (again, female outnumbering male). The second half of this course will be lectured by an adjunct. He doesn't appear to have a doctorate, so I'll call him Mr Macro (that's actually quite an awesome name).

The institution that will be employing me at the end of the year has finished its graduate recruitment round, with the result that I now have one future colleague among my classmates. I don't know her very well, but hopefully we'll get to know each other better once we're working in the same department.