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.