Ever after work is over

I found it.

We're gonna celebrate

Oh, yeah. I enrolled recently. My courses for Honours in economics next year are:

• First half
• ECON 403 - Macro B
• ECON 404 - Micro A
• ECON 408 - Econometrics A
• ECON 414 - Theories of Growth and Development
• Second half
• ECON 402 - Macro A
• ECON 405 - Micro B
• ECON 409 - Econometrics B
• ECON 423 - Macro Modelling for the New Zealand Economy

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).

Work it harder, make it better

Things that I must do before or around the end of the trimester, with dates:

• Two MATH assignments (27 May and 3 June)
• Two SOSC journal entries (30 May)
• One 3000-word SOSC essay (6 June)

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.

Our work is never over

Today I finished reading the boring boring boring Roper article that I started on Saturday. (I really should do something about my concentration, motivation, time management, sleeping habits, filing system, caffeine addiction... no maybe not that last one.) Unsurprisingly, it was boring.

It was naive, too. Roper managed to write 20 pages on "business political activity" in New Zealand between 1990 and 2005, yet never once mention political activity outside of the mainstream avenues of publishing and lobbying. He didn't mention donations or agreements or cross-pollination or cronyism. He didn't, therefore, draw any conclusion about the relative usefulness of all these activities in influencing policy directions. So far as I can see he didn't really draw a conclusion at all, beyond saying that his theoretical framework is better than everyone else's and he's sad that more people don't use it.

And that was what I would have written in my journal if I had had space. (Did I mention the journal template just barely allows for 30 words per main point per article?)

This morning I also visited Sandra and was told that the three authors I had already picked out were indeed the correct ones to be reading for an essay on political process theorising. She did suggest The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, too, which was helpful as I'd originally decided to disregard it.

I need to read more, faster. Better, harder and stronger would probably be handy too.