Martha's Table

I went back to Martha's Table in D.C. on Monday. It's surprising that the kids still remember me even though I started flaking in my commitment to volunteer at the beginning of my senior year. When I got there and came to the room of Group D, whose kids i am the most familiar with, Iencountered looks of "who the hell is this guy?" After a few tense seconds, it dawned on the kids who I was. "Hey it's uh.. Suh-..."

"It's Siwei!" I said, finishing his sentence.

The next thing that happened was Jalon challenging me to a game of Dots. It must have been two years since i taught these kids that game, yet they still remember that.

I started volunteering at Martha's Table my freshman year because I was interested in tutoring. I would go once a week, but stopped my senior year because I felt that I had too much on my place to handle. I still feel bad about it. Worse yet, I never really said goodbye to the teachers and kids there before I left for LA. At least now I have my chance to say goodbye. I definitely owe them something because my experience there has definitely shaped my character and allowed me to mature in a way that College Park couldn't. I'm looking forward to returning on Monday.

belief

I used to think I could handle economics but then I took graduate level macro.

thanksgiving 2009

I know Thanksgiving ended hours ago (even on the west coast) but I thought I'd write an entry for it. I ended up staying in Los Angeles because winter break is two weeks from Saturday (which also means finals are coming up wayyyy too soon, ugh) so I thought it wouldn't really be worth the effort, time, or money to see my parents in MD for 3 days, come back to LA for two weeks, and then stay with them again in MD for three weeks.

Luckily for me, I didn't spend the holiday alone because Eric invited everybody in our program to a potluck dinner at his place. Allen and I made mashed potatoes and ohh boy.. did we look like assholes. First, Sean also brought mashed potatoes, and in a larger quantity and perhaps a higher quality, but I don't know since I didn't try it. Second, Katie made the best mashed SWEET potatoes I have ever had (or maybe I've never had sweet potatoes mashed.. but whatever it was awesome). She also made a wonderful pumpkin pie ... FROM SCRATCH. I guess our mashed potatoes were from scratch too but we didn't have to gut a whole fresh pumpkin to make it. And third, everybody else's dishes owned our mashed potatoes. Except for Richard's fish sticks.

Anyway, the food was fantastic and I really enjoyed spending more time with classmates especially away from the context of school (although we did end up talking about economics. Then we decided to call it a night.)

I am thankful for many things in my life. Here's a short list:

1) I'm really glad to be in Los Angeles. I'd lived all 22 years of my life in Maryland, so the change in scenery was definitely welcome.

2) I was able to overcome the mysterious illness that struck me sophomore year. When it first happened, I thought it was devastating to my quality of life, but it's been more than 2 years, and I can say that it hasn't held me back, especially academically. I may write about this in the future.

3) I'm thankful my cat isn't dead. I will also write a post about this.

The promised posts will likely come after my exams are over. Anyway, I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving.

macro owns me

I haven't updated this for more than 5 weeks and a (relative) lot has transpired since then. The most pressing aspect of being at UCLA so far has been the first set of midterm exams. They hit me in this order: macroeconomics, microeconomics, and econometrics. This coincidentally matches the order of my self-guesstimated strengths in economics from weakest to strongest. As you may have guessed, I did the absolute worst on macro. It was the first graduate level exam of my academic career, so I didn't know what to expect. Excuses aside, I did poorly both absolutely and relative to the rest of my first year econ class, as I was almost the minimum score, but edged it out just barely.

Microeconomics and econometrics went well, as I scored above the average and median on both exams. But this is partly because many non-econ students take those classes, particularly those from the Anderson School of Management, so I'm not sure where I stood among my econ peers but probably much better than where I was in macro.

While micro and econometrics have been going alright, I'm worried about macro. Since the midterms, we've had a change in professors teaching the class and the new professor has assigned a TON of readings and "problem sets" that for some peculiar and illogical reason are not graded. I suppose as a graduate student, I need to be doing a lot of self-study. Which doesn't work so well with me because of another excuse: I think my mindset is still that of my undergraduate studies at Maryland. I seriously need to play some serious catchup and less playstation 3.

To partially misquote the Wizard of Oz: I have a feeling I'm not in Maryland anymore.

in the groove

So I was playing some In The Groove last week (which is essentially a more difficult copy of the step-dancing arcade game DDR) when I experienced an epiphany. So the way the game works is that for 3 quarters, you can play the step charts of a sequence of three songs. You complete steps charts by stepping on arrows that correspond to the arrows on the screen. The goal is to pass the songs successively. If you don't, and say, fail on the first song, your turn ends and you won't be able to choose a 2nd or 3rd song to play. The measure of success in the game is a bar which maximizes when you complete a lot of steps in a row, and drops as soon as you start missing steps. When the bar runs empty, you fail.

Anyways, I was playing this difficult song (for my level) and I had almost reached the end when I encountered a difficult stream of steps. I started missing some and I panicked. Since it was only the 2nd song, I knew that if I managed to get through the last leg of the song, I'll be able to choose a third song (and not waste 25 cents). Instead of looking out for the arrows coming up, my eyes darted to the dwindling bar on the screen. I don't know why, maybe because I wanted some assurance that I had some chance left to survive the last seconds of the song. Obviously, I failed.

What I took away from this was that it isn't the desired result that matters. It is (literally) the steps you take to get there that does. I definitely need to change my attitude towards various aspects of my life, especially graduate school. Before moving to Los Angeles, I was so psyched about studying at UCLA, getting a Ph.D. in economics, and either remaining in academia or selling out and working on Wall Street and eventually being charged and convicted for constructing an even greater Ponzi scheme, but I didn't really think about the steps required to get to those results. My undergrad studies at Maryland were relatively easy and I think I forgot what it was like to be overwhelmed academically and intellectually as I was at Blair. I'm beginning to remember as I face three problem sets all due in the coming week.

shaky start

The fall quarter at UCLA started on Thursday. That same day, I received an e-mail from John Riley saying essentially that the math boot camp exam diagnosed me as a complete failure in real analysis and recommended that I get some more practice (by staying in the math class). So in addition to taking macro, micro, and econometrics, I have a math class that meets for one hour each week. Needless to say, I was depressed by this. Moreover, I was disappointed in myself. The diagnostic quiz was really easy because it was based entirely on stuff covered during the math boot camp. I just neglected to study optimization in choice over time and lo and behold, one question amounting to 1/3 of the exam was on that. The class really isn't bad though. It has a really relaxed atmosphere and I enjoy Professor Riley's teaching methods. It's also good practice in proofs and such for the more math-intensive economics classes.

So far I've only had proper lectures in micro and macro since the Thursday class of metrics was a syllabus day, and it's cancelled for the current week. In micro we're learning about rational preference and its properties, which is the topic of our first problem set due in a week. This is actually my first graduate school problem set and I'm very excited.

In macro we talked about the history of macroeconomics and how classical economics was destroyed by the Great Depression and how Keynes came up and how his fellowship of Keynesian economists dominated macro until the oil crisis of the 70's, etc. It really impressed on me how important macroeconomics is. Also, this is my first macroeconomics class since my freshman year of college so.. we'll see where my interests lie a year from now.

Yesterday Sam, Allen, Jennie and I went to Koreatown to eat at a restaurant that specialized in tofu soup. Amazing stuff. It's too bad none of us brought a camera because there was so much food impressively served to us. We got the works: unlimited kimchi, a fried fish (which i ate whole except for the head (and including the bones) because I thought that's what you do with fried food but I guess not), a good amount of rice, pickles, some other stuff I don't remember because I'm cooking-illiterate, and a raw egg to put in our boiling tofu soup. The leftover juice from the rice was also scooped out and served to us towards the end of the meal to neutralize the spicy taste of the chili sauce-ridden tofu soup. All for $9 plus tax and tip.

Afterwards, we hit up a nearby Korean supermarket where I bought kimchi, chili sauce, tofu, noodles, and pork loins because I'm trying to learn from Sam how to make kimchi soup. I made some today for lunch, and I'm pretty sure I failed.

So there. I updated my blog. Oh, and it's been a while since I set up my room.. and I still have no pictures. I first need to clean this place up.

first day of "class"

Math boot camp started today. My friends laugh when I describe it as such.. but that's what it really is. It's a crash course in real analysis and linear algebra. Crash course in the sense that we're spending minutes on topics that would normally take half a lecture period. We were shown a proof of the existence of converging subsequences of bounded sequences by the iterative shading out of quadrants on the blackboard. Yeah.

For those of you who don't know, my laptop went out of commission apparently because of a bad chip of RAM. I talked to Dell and its contractor while on the road to LA and everything managed to work out. My parents brought it over here when they came to visit this past weekend.

I have most of my room furnished. I still need to build the dresser, a small cabinet/drawer thing, and a loveseat. Pictures of the room will come later when everything's up and I clean up the mess I've made over the last week.

So yeah, my parents came to visit over the Labor Day weekend. On Friday they flew in at 1:30 a.m. after missing their first flight from DC. I didn't go to sleep until maybe 4 a.m. that night >___<. On Saturday I had to wait around for an Ikea delivery and then we saw one of my mom's research collaborators at UCLA Neuroscience. Then we went to see my dad's old high school classmate at her house in Whittier. She had a couple other guests and family members over and yeah.. they were all about the same age. Despite the age difference, it's still good to know that my parents and, by association, I have good friends in the LA area. I got this sick shot of the LA skyline from her house up in the hills:

On Sunday we went to Pasadena to see my dad's alma mater Caltech. For dinner we ate at a really good Chinese restaurant in Arcadia. It was interesting to see so many plazas with signs all in Chinese.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up the visit from the parentals. Here's a picture of me and my mom right before I took my parents to LAX on Monday:

And thank Patrick for the awesome pic at the top. [EDIT: I removed the video and picture of my father cause he's paranoid of the interwebz.]

finally in LA

We finally arrived in Los Angeles in one piece. We took 10 through downtown LA to 405 took it north to Wilshire Blvd and arrived at UCLA. We're staying in the UCLA Guest House which is pretty neat. And, it's a lot better than our stays at the Marriott hotels already.. free wi-fi access (I'm actually logged in with my own username and password, but Patrick's using the info provided by the school), free breakfast in the morning, and very friendly greeters.

The first strange yet awesome thing about this place which Patrick noticed was that the road signs on the highways have BARBED WIRE on them.. which presumably are intended to prevent gang members from tagging the signs with spray paint. Haha, here's a pic:

There is also an aburdly high amount of traffic in Los Angeles. Here's another pic:

After eating at a Baja Fresh in Westwood (lame, I know, but we were just trying to find some food), we went to Ikea to buy a mattress and box spring to move into my apartment tomorrow. The dusk/night-time drive to and back from the Ikea in the San Fernando Valley was pretty exciting. We spotted fires in the mountains towards the east, a strong indication that the wildfires dangerously close to LA are far from quelled. Anyway, driving on the curvy roads through the hills was almost as exhilirating as driving in the desert at night in Arizona.

Move-in to me 385 sq ft apartment is tomorrow.

tucson after dallas

Writing from Tucson, Arizona at a Marriott where hotel wi-fi service costs $9.99 a day, but I can still connect to the University of Arizona's open wifi network. For free. Anyway, the drive here was alright. We went through El Paso, passing dangerously close to the Mexican border. We could see the Rio Grande and an enormous Mexican flag flying across it. The highlight of the day occured shortly thereafter. When we got into New Mexico, we were actually caught in a U.S. Border Patrol's dragnet. The patrolwoman asked me and Patrick individually if we were U.S. citizens. Haha, it was pretty intense for me at least. Here's a picture of the Border Patrol checkpoint:

After eating dinner at KFC because McDonald's was overpriced, we hit the road again, going west on Interstate 10 after the sun set and the moon shone brightly. Let me tell you.. driving in the desert at night feels so unreal.. in a good way. I10 has two lanes in each direction and in Arizona on a Sunday night, there aren't many cars on the road. It felt great to essentially have the road to myself and the slight fear of the unknown and of possible perils made it even more exhilirating. Here's a picture from during the drive, which I'd like to think is blurry because I was driving that fast.

So, since the last post on this blog we spent Saturday and Saturday night in Dallas with Mischa. We went to Dealey Plaza, the place where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated allegedly by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald. We went to the Sixth Floor museum about the assassination where I stood from the window from which Oswald allegedly fired his shots at the President. It was overwhelming to see Dealey Plaza, Elm St, and the Grassy Knoll from the 6th floor window. My knowledge of the tragedy comes only from Wikipedia and the Oliver Stone movie "JFK" but I was still in awe of the fact that I was actually standing at the historic scene.

Anyway here's a picture of two tourists standing on Elm Street on an "x" which, I'm guessing, marks the spot where Kennedy received the fatal headshot. The picture was taken from the fence on the Grassy Knoll, from which the most popular conspiracy theory claims at a (at least) second gunman stood and delivered the fatal shot. They and other tourists who also thought it would be cool to stand there were almost hit by cars (cause Elm St is actually a road.. on which cars drive..) and proved to be one of the most entertaining moments of our stay in Dallas.

Later that evening we got some steak fajitas at a TexMex place, which were delicious. Anyway, we need to move the car by 8 a.m. tomorrow to have free parking, so I'm going to sleep soon. Bonne nuit!

Dallas

I am now sitting in the living room of my dear friend Mischa Jampolsky in Richardson, a suburb of the great city of Dallas in the great state of Texas. We just had dinner at a BBQ place which was basically Hooters but with 100x hotter waitresses. I think I like Texas already. When they say everything is bigger in Texas.. it's absolutely true. Except for the lanes on the highway, which were felt kinda narrow. And they use physical bumps as lane dividers instead of painted lines:

The drive here from Nashville was really tiring and boring. Interstate 40 and 30 just straight shots from Nashville to Memphis to Little Rock to Texarkana to Dallas. Here is a picture of road signs pointing the way to the state capital of Arkansas:

I will probably upload all the pictures on Facebook sometime after Patrick and I accumulate more interesting images. Most of them are blurred images of grass and trees.. so yeah. I'm also exhausted from driving and honestly I want to save the more interesting images for when I'm not tired and can write coherently and Facebook. Yeah.

Nashville

We safely arrived in Nashville and just had some White Castle. What a great way to end the day. The drive itself was alright. US Interstate 81 really deserves its fame for its scenic route. Patrick took a bunch of pictures while I was driving on it.. will post them sometime.

leaving tomorrow

Tomorrow (well... at 9 a.m. today), I leave for Los Angeles. My route has changed from the last post to this blog. Instead of driving to Ann Arbor to pick up my cousin Patrick, he has flown down to Maryland so that we can begin the journey in Bethesda. We're going to stop in Nashville, Dallas (for two nights), Tucson, and finally LA.

Saying goodbye to friends has been difficult, but bearable. Instead of descending into despair or sadness, I am overwhelmed with a feeling of a great void. People who I have befriended and grown to trust and love for many years of my life will suddenly no longer be relevant in my daily life. I won't be able to call the same old friends to grab a bubble tea, to play tennis, to play poker, to hit the bars, to play ps3, or to play counter-strike. I supposed I could still play video games with friends, but the ping would be too damn high.

For the first time in my life, I will be completely alone. I'll know one person (sorta) in Los Angeles and one more in the SoCal area. Parents won't be 15 miles away like they used to when I was at the University of Maryland. This is definitely a great opportunity for me to finally mature (albeit steadily since I'll still be in an academic setting), but I fear that I may become lonely. I'll surely meet people through my classes and campus activities, but the familiarity of setting and deep connections with many people that I've enjoyed in the 22 years of my life will be lost. I will still have the memories and hopefully they'll comfort me as I embark on my journey across the country and as I settle in to a brave new world (for me). Oh, and MSN and AIM will comfort me as well.

Farewell Maryland. I owe you and your flagship university an immense debt. Thank you friends for your support, patience, understanding and the memories throughout the years. And thank you ma and pa for being not-so-Asian and supportive of my decision to move 2700 miles away. I'm not sure when, but I hope to return in even happier times.

money and driving

I am not going to lie. The California budget crisis really worries me. The fact that higher education is probably get a $3 billion cut is disconcerting to say the least. This will obviously impact UCLA since it has the highest operating costs out of the whole UC system. The economics department promised in writing that admitted graduate students would be able to gain financial support by undertaking teaching assistantships in their second year, but I'm not so sure that's actually going pan out. Even before the announced proposal, the department couldn't offer me a first year stipend, and only offered my friend $10,000, which is only barely enough to cover rent and not enough for UCLA's own graduate housing. I'm even beginning to have regrets about declining Duke's and Cornell's generous offers so deliberately.

The current budget deal will shut down a lot of programs that in particular aim to benefit low-income people (and in Los Angeles like most cities, that means minorities). The Los Angeles Times wrote that lobbyists for the makers of TurboTax were even pressing the state legislators to dismantle a program that has the state tax board fill out the tax returns of low-income residents for free. It definitely must suck to be poor in California now. There probably was a convincing reason to start the program in the first place. Maybe.. it was to make it so that people who don't speak English and therefore don't know which fields mean what on the tax forms would be able to file their returns. This seems pretty important, and it's sad that the politicians were actually listening. I understand that taxes were astronomically high in California already, but I don't understand why the Republicans won't even allow a teeny tiny tax increase on the rich.. which LA and SF have many of. That would save programs that people really depend on, not to mention the jobs that the programs support.

Anyways here's a screenshot of my planned driving route to California, for the sake of adding images to this colorless blog. In posting/editing mode, this image seems to be of very low quality. Oh well. (EDIT: but ah, I see you can click on the thumbnail to see the original image in its full Microsoft Paint-cropped glory.)

Some of you readers have heard this from me already, but here are my stops:

1. Bethesda, MD
2. Ann Arbor, MI
3. Memphis, TN
4. Dallas, TX
5. Temple, TX
6. Los Angeles, CA

I am picking up my cousin Patrick at the University of Michigan or as I like to call it: the fake M school (since you know.. Maryland is the real one). I'm visiting a couple friends in Texas and then hopefully making it to LA. I'm leaving Bethesda on August 26 and hopefully reaching Westwood on the evening of the 31st and moving in to my 385 sq ft studio (including the kitchen and the bathroom) on September 1. Crap.

I don't have any obligations until September 8, so I'll have some free time to check things out. I fantasize that this will include locating all the sweet bars, the cool clubs, and the hotspots in West LA but this will probably boil down to locating where the closest supermarket, convenience store, pharmacy, and farmer's market are.

parking

So it turns out my move-in date is September 1, which means I have 7 or 8 weeks left in Maryland. I plan to put in my two weeks notice in the next couple weeks so I'll be able to enjoy my last days in Maryland with my parents and my friends.

I'm pretty concerned about the whole parking situation. I plan to drive my s40 all the way to Los Angeles with the help of my cousin Patrick, so it would suck immensely if for some reason I am not given parking. The thing is, we are not allowed to apply for parking until our move-in date. By that time, I will have already driven ~3000 miles so... yeah. I called university housing yesterday about the possibility of my parking app being rejected and the guy told me that parking is not guaranteed, but it hasn't been a problem in the past. Great. I hope it works out or else I wouldn't know what the heck to do. I'd probably be forced to subject my car to public parking for a couple days while I work to get it shipped back to Maryland.

ready for UCLA

So it seems that all the outstanding paperwork I had regarding UCLA has been squared away. I was stressed because for a while, it seemed that the U.S. Postal Service had failed to deliver one of my forms. This doesn't bode well for my receiving of presents and cupcakes via mail for the next five years in Los Angeles.

As for the whole moving thing, I have yet to actually sit down and iron out my itinerary. Driving across the country doesn't sound like a trivial task, and I'm definitely not trying to underestimate it.

There's still downtime for the Virtual Worlds project, but I've been getting some work from one of the Berkeley economists here, Rob. In addition to working on his auction project, I'm organizing the annual graduate school information session hosted by the FTC for student interns and research analysts think of going to graduate and professional school. I'm planning to leave the Commission before the scheduled date of the event, but I'd probably get negative, if any, utility from it due to random regrets from my admissions experience.

bad start

yesterday was a complete disaster. i wouldn't say i'm incredibly lucky for not being involved in the red line accident because i get on at union station, 4 or 5 stops after fort totten, but still. while i was annoyed at the fact that my train was late going home by 30 minutes, i had no idea what had just occured on the same line i was riding and now i feel like an ungrateful fool. many people including my parents seem to have lost faith in the metro rail system in d.c., but i view this as a freak accident. articles in the washingtonpost say that the fail-safe computer program controlling the trains was designed to prevent the type of accident that occured yesterday. obviously, something screwed up pretty badly, and my thoughts are with the victims and their families

everybody working on my virtual world project is out either on vacation or sick, so i am immensely bored and decidedly writing another entry in this blog. i could be occupying myself with the literature that an anti-trust economist named Alan gave me: two UCLA economics textbooks and two California Law Review pieces he wrote about price theory when it comes down to horizontal mergers of companies.

so basically, a merger is challenged by the government when it believes that such a merger would lead to anti-competitive effects. this is less common in perfect competitive markets that have an "infinite" number of firms, but more so in oligopoly-type markets. in these, there are only a handful of big players, so if any two of them decide to merge, the newly formed company will have an enormous market share to play with and will probably raise prices.. because it can. basically what the readings are about is how the government should also consider market efficiencies that result from mergers. these efficiencies make the cost of production lower, and by basic economics since MR = MC, prices should fall. so, if the increased market share's anti-competitive effect is offset by this market efficiency, then the government should approve the merger. i'm too much of a novice to go into more detail, but i hope my interest in the topic is evident.

so today after getting to work half an hour late because of delays on the red line, i

1) checked my e-mail
2) perused facebook
3) checked my e-mail
4) made a LinkedIn account
5) picked up another reading from Alan
5) ate lunch
6) checked my e-mail
7) wrote this blog entry

summer work

so my post-graduation journey towards studying economics began at the beginning of summer with my appointment as a clerk (read: summer intern) to the federal trade commission in DC. this is the beginning of my fourth week into the program, and i'm still excited about its potential benefit to both my interest in economics and my intellectual growth.

my position is typical of any summer intern position: i do whatever they tell me to do. in this particular environment, they entails economists, who all have ph.d.'s in economics, public policy, and related fields, and research analysts who are interested in going to graduate school. but at least they have the courtesy to ask if i want to do it, but i'm not sure if refusal is an option.

in recent days, the only project i've been heavily involved in is basically seeing how much explicit material a curious 12-year old can find by venturing into virtual worlds on the internet, such as second life. so yeah. economics isn't all about money. the project has been an interesting experience. however, i am now certain that i do not want to work in behavioral economics.

i will write more soon.