Tag Archives: university

04.26.13
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Economics Class

This is what I found when I searched 'economics' on Google images.

This is what I found when I searched ‘economics’ on Google images.

I had my last real economics class last Monday. (This upcoming Monday doesn’t count since that’s the exam.) I honestly can’t say I’ll miss the class, which is paradoxical. After all, I liked the teacher and absolutely loved the material. I learned a lot and I am more informed when I read the business section of the newspaper.

What I didn’t like about the class were two things. First off, the textbook was absolutely dreadful. It was so bad that I’m not even going to link to it on Amazon. (For those curious, we used Krugman’s Economics in Modules.) Most of the time, I ended up reading other sources. I even downloaded a few free textbooks (legally, of course) that were a lot more useful than the dreadful tome we used. Luckily, I only paid thirteen dollars for my copy (thank goodness for Amazon marketplace!), so that makes me feel a bit better.

The other aspect of the class that bothered me were the people. We did not cover nearly as much material as planned – I would estimate that we shaved off about one-third of the material because people could not keep up. I’ve said this before: I don’t mind it when people ask questions. What is annoying is when one person monopolizes an entire thirty minutes of class time talking about a basic algebra issue. This person was the worst combination: she was both outspoken and stupid, which made for some frustrating questions asked.

This isn’t the last economics class I’ll take. In fact, I know that this fall, I will be enrolled in an intensive macroeconomics and microeconomics course. I hope my experience will be better than my recent one.

And I sincerely hope that we will not use any textbooks written by Paul Krugman.

04.24.13
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At Least That’s Done

I took my statistics final today and got an A. I am so glad to be done with that class. I really liked the material, but dealing with a teacher who could not write clear test questions if her life depended on it was really, really annoying. Seriously, I don’t think she could write English properly.

04.05.13
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The End is in Sight

I have only three more weeks of classes left. That’s sort of scary, because it means I have to start studying for finals (note to any high school and college students out there: the best thing you can do to ensure a decent grade in a class is start studying early!) and it means I’m that much closer to my crazy intense class this summer. (I took these two classes in preparation for the summer class.)

I am a bit sad for statistics to end. I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected. After the drop/add deadline last month, over half the class dropped and the people who remain ask a lot fewer stupid questions now. Unfortunately, I do not feel the same affection for economics. I like the subject better than statistics, but the class itself is dreadful. The people ask the most absurd questions. One girl in particular can barely do basic algebra. (She also hopes to be a CPA. I’m not sure how well that will work out for her, as that CPA exam is supposed to be actually difficult.)

My final exams are within five days of each other, at the end of this month. I’ve already started making a study sheet for statistics. Soon I’ll be sending those final grades to Texas, then going to Texas myself.

03.09.13
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Happy March!

Crocus and snowdrops in London (Hampstead Heath).

Crocus and snowdrops in London (Hampstead Heath).

Happy March, everyone! I’m officially on spring break now, so I should be able to go on a little vacation, right? Wrong, I have quite a bit of schoolwork to do, as both of my professors have decided to give tests the week we get back from spring break. I’ve had a lot of material to study, so that’s been keeping me busy.

I have also:

  • been seeing movies (Dark Skies is amazing; The Master is not)
  • gone to the dentist (that was yesterday and it was surprisingly not terrible)
  • been writing (my internet friend Vicki finished the first draft of her book, which makes me feel both envious and inspired)
  • been playing violin (I played lots of Beethoven today and no Mozart, surprisingly)

How has everyone else been doing?

Photo credit.

02.03.13
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‘Tourism for Credit’

I hate to say it, people, but doing a six-month program in Chile, for example, during which you have one required “course” for two weeks in which everyone gets an A, then a month off to travel, then you come back and take two courses at the local university for four months is not the same as studying for a year at a university in the UK where you do actual work. Yes, I know taking courses in a foreign language is hard, but a person in the first scenario I described (i.e. my friend’s sister) should not receive almost as much credit as a person who did the second scenario I described (i.e. me).

My friend’s sister is studying abroad in Chile this semester, and her program is the reason why American study abroad programs are sometimes disparagingly called “tourism for credit.”

01.17.13
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A Milestone

I think I have reached a milestone in my personal development. Unlike last semester, I did not relentlessly scrutinize the course listings of my alma mater for this year’s spring classes. I did not even realize that I had not done this until a few nights ago, when I was talking to my friend B. She told me that she had endlessly analyzed the course listings in her undergraduate major. At that moment, I realized I had not done so, and did not miss doing so.

It’s almost dinner time, so I cannot write any more. But rest assured, I have many fabulous posts planned, including a few concerning what I’ve been doing lately!

01.06.13
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I Hate the GMAT (and the GMAT Hates Me)

This is a rant; don’t read it unless you want to read my whining about a certain standardized exam!

I’ve been very annoyed all weekend because I took the GMAT on Friday. The GMAT, or Graduate Management Admission Test, is often used by business schools to screen applicants. I am applying to an academic program that requires it, so I took it. However, I’ve been angry because I did not receive the score I wanted. None of the prep questions I did, including the official GMAT software available on the official website, even remotely resembled the questions I saw on the exam. I felt very rushed on the math (no calculators are allowed, so I did lots of calculations by hand) and towards the end, I didn’t even understand some of the questions. (Did I mention that the test is adaptive, as in if you answer some questions correctly, the computer program gives you increasingly harder questions?)

What really annoyed me was the verbal section. Verbal is my thing, if you know what I’m saying. I’ve always been better with words than with numbers, so I expected to do well on the verbal section of the GMAT. I was worried while taking the exam, though, as some of the sentence correction questions (basically, you choose the correct wording for a sentence out of five options) simply did not have a correct answer. Really, what’s a person to do when all the given options have equally atrocious grammar?

I’ve been so angry ever since. I feel like I wasted both money (the test registration fee is $250!) and time on this exam (both the time I spent taking the exam and the time I spent studying). I never thought I would say this, but I love the GRE. For me, at least, the math was a lot easier and the verbal section actually made sense.

01.02.13
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Admissions at Elite Universities

I read this article on Inside Higher Ed a few days ago and it really bothered me. The British minister for universities criticized the admissions system at Ivy League schools. Though his criticism was valid, it annoyed me because the admissions at Oxford and Cambridge aren’t much better.

I know there are people admitted to Ivy League schools who deserve to be there – but there are many admitted who do not deserve to be there. Anyway, I rather liked this comment I posted, and I did not want to see it confined to comment oblivion on a random article, so I’m posting it here.

(You should probably read the article before reading this, as it won’t make much sense otherwise.)

Ugh, what a hypocrite. I fully agree with David Willetts about Ivy League schools – getting in isn’t often a result of a meritorious process, and I hate that. But Willetts has conveniently ignored that admissions to Oxford and Cambridge are EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. You can buy your children a place there, too, a fact that he has conveniently chosen to ignore. I studied abroad at one of the above-mentioned universities in the UK and I met some of the stupidest people I have ever met in my entire life while there. Seriously, these people were very thick, as the British would say. I couldn’t figure out how on earth they were accepted to this prestigious institution, until I found out that they always had insanely rich parents who sent them to Eton, or Winchester, or Westminster (all prestigious secondary schools in the UK) and who often gave money to a couple of the colleges at Oxford. And there weren’t just a few stupid people there, either. There is an incredibly high percentage of very idiotic undergraduates at these so-called top universities. (Though I must say, in my experience, that graduate admissions appear to be more meritorious. All of the graduate students I met were highly intelligent.)

There was also an interesting divide in student quality and intelligence by subject matter. On average, the science and math students were more deserving of their places than humanities students. The humanities students varied quite a bit: history and modern languages contained both nice, hard-working people and entitled, insipid fools who were just there to socialize for 3 or 4 years. One of the more amusing experiences I had was with a student who was in her fourth (and final) year studying a modern language. I speak this language fluently, so I tried to speak it with her, only to realize that she could not speak a word of it. Keep in mind that modern language students at this university spend a compulsory year abroad living and working in a country where the language they’re studying is spoken.

My point is that this practice is terrible. I think university admissions should be handled on academic merit only. But it really rankles me when the British (or anyone else) criticize us Americans for doing exactly what they do, too.

01.01.13
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С Новым Годом, or Happy New Year!

I hope everyone is having a great 2013 so far. Have you made any resolutions?

Here are some of my own:

  • Learn more Russian. My Russian has improved a lot this year, but I want to improve even more. I want to learn more vocabulary and improve my pronunciation. I also want to read more books, both classics and modern literature.
  • This is related to the prior point: I want to stop lusting after other foreign languages and focus my efforts on my Russian. I’d rather know one foreign language with near-native fluency than two at a mediocre level. And I will stop obsessing over Serbian, once and for all! I love this language, I badly want to learn it, but I cannot at this point because it is similar enough to Russian to confuse me, and I certainly don’t want that to happen.
  • I’m signed up for two classes this semester and I plan to achieve top marks in both.
  • I want to read less and write more this year. Lots of reading is never a bad thing (seriously, the world would be a better place if more people read more books), but sometimes I feel like my reading time cuts into time I could be spend writing. And I want to finish that fabulous novel I’m working on, once and for all!

And I’m going to be all sanctimonious here and inform you that, while many of you are probably bundled up, freezing from snowy weather, I am sitting in my room with the window open since it’s 64 degrees outside. :) Ah, life in the Balmy Tropics…

12.30.12
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On the Absurdity of Academia

I’m reading a discussion about university education in the United States on The Economist (a British publication that writes about the US a lot) and I just had to quote this comment. This person truly understands the absurdities one often encounters in academia.

The only worthwhile research is that done in the “hard” sciences and, perhaps, in psychology and sociology. For other disciplines, and I mean history, political science, gender studies, Lit, and languages, the “research” is just endless re-churning of the same data in hopes that this will earn the researcher tenure.

If another book about, for example, the Civil War is never written we will be just fine. It is, though, only a matter of time until an aspiring academic publishes her dissertation, “Pink Union Suits — Gays in the Army of the Potomac.” This will inspire someone to write “Johnny Deb: Coming Out of the Closet in Lee’s Army.” Shortly thereafter will come the first revisionist work, “Ramrod: Male Sexuality in Civil War Armies.” A scholarly conference will ensue with calls for papers and inevitably, a new academic association will emerge. Universities, now wasting taxpayer money with Black Studies, Asian Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, etc., will request — and receive– state funds to establish a Department of Military Sexuality Studies. More conferences more papers . . . more tax money down the drain.

Naive liberal arts majors will emerge up to their kysters in debt assumed to obtain a B.A. in Military Sexuality Studies. They will starve.

Though I disagree a bit – not all humanities* research is useless (I’ve seen interesting political science work about the political system in Belarus, for example, and the 1990s in Russia have not yet been properly examined by historians, so the potential for good work exists there) – this person truly understands the weird, weird ways in which many academics like to analyze events. This comment was just too amazing not to post.

*By humanities, I mean legitimate fields like history, political science, and literature. That gender studies nonsense is not humanities. I don’t even recognize it as a proper academic field in which research should be conducted.

11.12.12
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Incompetence

One of the things I despise most is incompetence. I have no patience at all for incompetent people.

Unfortunately (for me), I have encountered a fair amount of incompetent people, both in academia and out. That’s why I found this passage in Robert Harris’ Archangel so amusing (and sadly accurate).

‘What’s he saying?’ demanded Duberstein, who was considered a world authority on Soviet communism even though he had never quite got round to learning Russian.

It’s sad but true: academia seems to tolerate – and even reward – incompetence in a way the non-academic world does not. And yes, I am aware that there are incompetent people in the private sector (and even more in the government sector), but academia is just a whole different world. The tenure system rewards only those who toe the official line (if you have a radical new theory that goes against the views of major scholars in your field, you would do well not to publish that theory until after tenure, or else you risk not getting tenure) and it also does not allow incompetent people to be fired, as they would be in a company.

Consider this: can you imagine an accountant who did not know general accounting practices? Or a tax lawyer ignorant of modern tax law? Or how about a doctor who did not know human anatomy? We all believe (or, at least, would like to believe) that these people would be fired (and possibly sued).

Yet while on my study abroad, I had a tutor who was writing a doctoral dissertation in Russian history and he, like our esteemed (fictional) Dr. Duberstein, had never managed to properly learn Russian. Keep in mind that he was (allegedly) basing his dissertation on Russian archival sources.

I am sympathetic to people who develop an interest in a field late in their undergraduate years and discover too late that they do not have the requisite language skills. I have met such people, people who suddenly discovered a passion for Russian literature, but had never taken a Russian language class. I recognize that I was really, really lucky in being able to take (and learn) a foreign language that matches my interests so well. But if a person does not have the required language skills to do research for a dissertation, that individual should first acquire the requisite language skills. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

09.19.12
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A University Whistleblower

So I realize I am not an actual whistleblower. I just liked how dramatic the title of this post sounded. But I was rather incensed at the falsehoods in this article about science students at my alma mater and could not resist writing something about it.

The article can be found here and I would highly suggest reading it before reading this post, as this post will not make much sense without it. The article is about science undergraduates at my university and I am qualified to speak on this subject because I myself was a science student during my freshman year. I intended to major in chemistry back then. However, I discovered two things after first semester: first, I missed history so much and second, the chemistry department was incredibly hard to work with and was more interested in researching than teaching a bunch of undergraduates.

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