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This blog is now closed.
In May, when I graduate, I'll probably post something about that. In the event of my doing further study in the future, I'll consider writing about it here. Otherwise, all my posting is now over at litblog.
Thanks for reading.
Oh, yeah. I enrolled recently. My courses for Honours in economics next year are:
The first three in each half are "core" courses which will make me a career economist (as opposed to an academic one). The last in each half is a special interest paper. I really, really want to do ECON 423, but this year it didn't run due to lack of enrolments. We'll be informed soon about course availability for next year. I live in hope.
We're being advised to go to a three-day preparatory math course for economics and finance, in the week before classes start. Despite having a math degree, and the stated intention of certain of my unmathematical classmates to not attend, I think I'll go along. It'll be a good way to warm up for the year, and it will help me to see what they expect us to know. There's even a chance I may learn something (about statistics, certainly, not pure math).
More progress! Bayes-Nash equilibrium was a trivial extension of the Bayesian Normal Form. I read the textbook chapter on moral hazard. Where is the hard? It all seemed much nastier when Paul did examples in class. The review sheet he's made, a complete overview of contract theory, is extremely helpful. It really does gather into one place all the theory behind the last six weeks of class. It still doesn't define full verifiability, though. I'm resigning myself to going intuitive on that one.
My plans for next year have changed a bit, with the result that my timetable now looks a whole lot friendlier:
The Micro assignment, due Monday, is now effectively done except for a few semantic issues. (Must I really go through and asterisk every variable that is known to be taking its socially efficient value? Really? Cos there are quite a few of them.) The only thing left to do this trimester is now a 1500-word essay, due Friday.
The test finally came back - five weeks after we sat it - but the marking is very unclear. Apparently I got 13. 13 out of what? There's no way to tell, and the lecturers aren't answering their email.
Yesterday there was a meeting for next year's Honours students. It was a slightly scary meeting, with lots of harping on about the workload, but not much actual information. There were maybe 20 intending Honours students there. I recognised some of them, but most of them are complete strangers. I'm so far out of my year it's not funny.
In what can only be an underhand trick to make me attend an International econ lecture, the annual meeting for next year's Honours students is scheduled at the same time and in the same place as Friday's lecture. They're achieving this by not running an International lecture on Friday.
The end of the year is way too close.
Things which are puzzling me today:
So, on Thursday Paul ran the tutorials for the first time, and it was kinda cool. He made us participate and stuff, which works better in a group of eight than a group of 35. Then there was a lecture; I already don't remember anything about it.
A while ago I mentioned the new Bachelor of Economics and Finance being brought in to replace the old BCA. The idea seemed to be that, with the new BCA requiring a whole bunch of time-wasting dummy papers (from next year, compulsory papers include MGMT 101, MARK 101, INFO 101 and QUAN 102), it would be good to have a separate programme for people who want to study economics properly. The BEF design was based strongly around maths and stats papers - essential stuff that would never fit into the new BCA programme without requiring at least one extra year, probably more.
The news now comes out that, although the new BCA is being implemented, the BEF has been rejected. From next year, the only way to do a proper degree in economics at Victoria University will be to take econ as a BA major. How long now till they take economics from the Faculty of Commerce and put it in Humanities where it belongs?
Between this, and the splitting of compsci from math, and what's been done to the schools of film and women's studies (and the wider Faculty of Education)... maybe it's not such a bad thing to be leaving at the end of next year.
Today's lecture was simply painful. Paul seems to have decided that he will ask us questions in lieu of us asking him. Trouble with that theory is, the same reasons that cause people not to ask questions (boredom, lack of understanding, tiredness, distraction) are likely to also cause them to not answer them. At some point Paul actually went as far as saying "look, I'm not going to remember to not ask you questions, so it'd be easier for everyone if you answered them." Not a sound, not a murmur. Personally I was torn between lack of understanding and simultaneously doing my math assignment (I suppose it's possible that these two things may have been related). Can't speak for the others, but one would charitably assume that they all had similarly good reasons for not answering.
Charitably? Nah. People are just people. Illustration of this: Today I got hemmed in on a group of sofas (I hate when people do this to me) by a group of girls who thought the library at Pipitea is the Central library. They were all surprised when the pathetically small Commerce library failed to carry the book on statistics they wanted. It's depressing that some commerce students are so immersed in commerce that they really think this campus is some sort of hub.
Today I discovered that the timetables are out for next year's courses, and spent a miserable hour putting together various potential timetables for my Honours course. Miserable because, well, see for yourself:
Things that I must do before or around the end of the trimester, with dates:
Due to family commitments, I won't really have any time to do anything after 30 May. That makes things seem more urgent than they are.
My 2008 Offer of Study arrived yesterday. It's nearly two weeks since I enrolled - obviously at this time of year there's no great sense of urgency in the admin office. Next year then, all things being equal, I will be doing the following:
That's three more courses than I need to finish all my majors, but if I only did what was necessary then my year would be boring, and we can't have that.
The above list raises a few issues for the raison d'etre of this blog. Firstly, I'm not finishing my econometrics major because all the QUAN papers I haven't done clash with SOSC 318, and econometrics isn't so important that it's worth changing my choice of SOSC paper for. This means that I'm now doing three majors, not four, so I have to change my blog description. Oh noes.
Secondly, having already finished my MATH major, I'm now doing two extra MATH papers. Because I can. This means that MATH 301 was not, after all, the final paper of my major. It was the final paper I needed to do for the major though, so I decree that it still counts for blogging purposes.
Finally, I'm doing two ECON papers simultaneously in the second half of the year, meaning that either of them could qualify as my "final" ECON paper. I'll choose which one to blog about when I get there (or maybe do both). For the first half, though, there's no ambiguity - SOSC 318 is definitely my last sociology paper ever, so I will be recording it, here, from February 25. Stay tuned.
Here is a summary of the last three weeks of MATH 301.
Today I attended a Meeting and also visited Rob The Graduate Studies Coordinator, both of which made me feel better about things in general and next year in particular. There are still exams to get through, though, and I'm tired.
Tonight I'll probably be up all night, and I'll probably be lucky to get half the assignment done in that time. It's a real beauty this week - must be Peter's idea of a going-away present.
Still alive, kinda. One week of lectures to go. Got 27/30 for assignment 8 and 25/30 for the test. I'm really annoyed with that test mark - it reflects a certain overconfidence about some questions, which is something I thought I'd grown out of.
Assignment 9 made it into the box okay yesterday, although not without causing some stress for the people who were around me while I was finishing it. [I'm not a friendly person when under pressure. I wish I was. I'm working on it.]
On Thursday I told Chris my dreams and he told me some facts about the real world which I would have been happier not knowing. Suddenly I'm not going anywhere and my favourite activities are a waste of time.
"The child is grown" was a close second for the title of this post.
This morning I attended a tutorial, with Bex and about six others. Much chalk was ground to dust by the Fouriers workings of our brains. I see new approaches to a couple of the assignment questions now, although I'm no happier about Fourier series than I was yesterday. Later I started making a few Maple plots for question 1, but I got rather hijacked by confusion about the sum-to-product trig formulae [either I've done something wrong, or Maple 11 has lost the ability which Maple 9 had to simplify a sum to a product automatically].
Excitement for the day: Bought a new backpack. Emailed Chris about Plan B.
Today [Saturday] I sent my first email to Peter. He hasn't replied yet. From this I draw the startling conclusion that Peter is not Chris. The email was prompted by a small confusion over question 2 of assignment 8; once that's cleared up, I will have only the thinky parts [questions 3 to 5] still to do. There's a nasty QUAN assignment due this week, too.
Going over the solutions to assignment 7 I made a rather remarkable discovery about eigenspaces, and although it looks obvious in retrospect, it's made me feel happy.
My work patterns seem to be a little strange this trimester. I'm working harder than ever before [evidence: unfamiliarly regular study-induced headaches] but I also have long, disconcerting bouts of free time, like this evening. Empty blocks in my day could be taken as a good sign; they indicate that I'm not having to use all of my resources on only two papers. This surplus suggests I may actually be capable of handling Plan B. Even what I call Plan A would require me to work harder than I'm currently doing, so all things considered, free time now is good in the long run... wherever that may end me up.
And still doing mechanical stuff, finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors. [What does "eigen" mean anyway?] Working very slowly for some reason - possibly because I'm simultaneously studying for the QUAN test. In 21 hours I won't have to worry about that any more...
The plans for that thing which I can't write about here are coming along very nicely now. Thank you for your interest.
Today I've been solving systems containing so many equations that I'm running out of Greek letters to name them with. That's my only excuse for such a terrible title pun. Please forgive me.
I'm now halfway through question 8 of the assignment. It's hard work, largely mechanical, not very interesting but mildly satisfying when I do find that solution button. Maple is useless for checking my answers - it insists on delivering all complex solutions, which makes it rather difficult to separate out the real ones I need - so I'm largely flying blind. This makes me nervous when there's so much working involved where I could be making silly mistakes, but it's good for me really. Maple's solutions are only as good as the information you're able to give it. There do exist problems which are harder to input than to solve by hand.
The test came out today. It's one of those strange "take-home tests" - effectively just a long assignment, worth 30% and due on September 14. For a project which I'd expected to take up the entire mid-trimester break, it doesn't look very long. Only four questions, and only one of those seems to contain anything conceptually difficult. No doubt this is compensated by technical difficulties which will become apparent after I start working on it.
Assignment 6 is out too, a few days early, due on September 7. This system of due dates [just look at me misusing mathematical terms in informal writing, I've been working too much recently] doesn't seem to create a lot of stress for the mid-trimester break, although that all depends on the true difficulty of the test.
Here's my plan for the next couple of weeks:
I continue to be surprised at how well this course is going. There must be something nasty waiting around the corner, or else I've been doing something terribly wrong all this time and I haven't noticed it yet. But my assignment marks are good and I'm neither struggling nor panicking, so I can't see where these anticipated horrors could come from. I shall press on and pretend they're not there, and then maybe they won't be.
