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.