Last Thursday I finished my finals and completed the first semester of my program! I still can't believe that Harvard made us study over Christmas, but the good news is that starting next year we will be on a traditional schedule with finals before Christmas. Much better. Anyway, the semester is over and now I have a week and a half break until spring term starts up!
Looking back on the semester, overall I'd say it was about what I expected: hard, enlightening, frustrating, rewarding, and nice to have out of the way. Lots of people have commented to me something to the effect of, "it must be incredible to learn from some of the world's top economists at at time like this." While I definitely agree that it's awesome to have so many smart people teaching me, I heard surprisingly little about the financial crisis during my courses. For the most part the professors stuck to the lesson plans and went over model after model after model with us. The real purpose of the first year of my program is to catch us up on what has been happening in academic economics over the past 50 years, leaving them little time to talk about current events. However, there is a special course this spring where each week a different professor will give his take on the crisis, and I'm definitely going to be there. So I should hear a lot more about it all over the next 4 months! Besides that class on the financial crisis, I'll have microeconomics II, econometrics, and either behavioral finance or macroeconomics II. Sounds like fun, eh?
So, what am I going to do over the break? So far I've done a lot of snow shoveling (I think we've had nearly 15 inches over the past two days--the picture above is the view from our kitchen), and I've taken poor Ellis to the doctor a couple of times to deal with Bronchialitis (RSV). Now that he's feeling better and there isn't more snow on the horizon, I'm hoping to relax a bit, maybe watch some movies, put new strings on my guitar, read, etc. Sometimes being in school isn't all that bad.
3 comments:
A friend of mine attended law school at Stanford, and the first year students had to study for finals over Christmas, too. I don't know why some schools do that, but I think it's cruel and unusual punishment. :D Good luck with the next semester.
I remember times in my high school education when a semester and finals didn't happen until after Christmas. I always found it so frustrating to always have the stress of approaching finals in the back of my mind throughout Christmas break.
I know Peter was sort of missing school (just a little bit) when he finished last August because he thought it would be fascinating to talk about what was currently happening in the economy. The special course you'll be taking sounds fascinating. I can't say I'm jealous of the rest of the classes you'll be taking. :)
I think you made up the word 'econometrics,' Ben.
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