no longer a bachelor....... of economics.

My Master's of Arts in Economics was conferred to me via a very impersonal e-mail. It didn't even say that my degree was in economics; it simply said that my "MASTER OF ART" degree was conferred. I guess whoever programmed the script left an pretty important field out. But at least it read "GO BRUINS!" at the end.

I'm set on studying Industrial Organization and Econometrics as my two fields. I'm already swamped with work, but at least I'm not as disgruntled about it as I was a year ago. I'm almost done with my paper for a class from last quarter (which is already more than 3 weeks late) and I have a bunch of problem sets to do this week for econometrics. Tomorrow I'm giving a short homework presentation estimation with lagged variables with Miao, but the problem is my code doesn't seem to exhibit the results that the professor wanted, and it's already 12:50 a.m.

I'm a teaching assistant for ECON101, which is the last course in the undergrad microeconomics sequence. Formally, it's called Microeconomic Theory, and it serves mostly as an introduction to game theory. I must say that the undergrads here are receiving a much stronger undergraduate education in economics than I did at my alma mater. The stuff my students are learning now was taught mostly in my upper division Game Theory course back at Maryland. I'm optimistic about it though, since I've heard that it has been going the whole nine yards in terms of revamping the undergrad program, making it much more math-intensive. Anyway, I really enjoy being a TA for the class because at this level, the students are mostly econ or business econ majors and want to really learn the stuff.