Economics Students

Wow! I have a busy week and a half ahead of me. In this week coming up I have two assignments due and a test and then on the following Monday and Tuesday I have two more tests. What fun! So I thought I'd give you an insight into the day of an Economics masters student. So here's an example of a typical Wednesday

We only arrive on campus in time for our class at noon which is Econometrics lab - ie a practical. The lecturer is rather amusing - he told us in our first prac that he runs the class like a business meeting. We are therefore given an agenda at the start and by the end will have covered all the topics on the agenda, just not necessarily in the same order. It's a fun class! He demonstrates/teaches while we try the same things on our computer. What's really funny is when he makes a mistake and can't work out what's wrong because it's normally something small and stupid but all our programs work! We're essentially learning how to use SAS - a statistical modeling package - at the moment so it's a fairly common occurrence.

We then have a whole bunch of time to kill before our next class so being the responsible, mature Masters students that we are...
We work! Lots of people (like Jen) bring their laptops in their bags to varsity.

We get confused with silly questions (like Jaren) and help each other out! (I'm a fan of working in a group).

And we eat (like Tiffany). All the food places on campus are fast food chains which is nice in some ways because if you're hungry you have a large number of options. Then there's alway the market which stocks fairly similar stuff to a corner cafe - everything!

Of course the other thing we do in our spare time is get bored of working (like me) and so you start taking random photos of your friends!

At about 4pm all my friends disappear off to their class - North American Economics - which I am not taking thankfully. They have 3 books to read and summarise at the moment - not fun! I have office hours. I actually had a student this week so I couldn't update my blog then :-( We have Microeconomics in the evening which is fairly sleep-inducing to put it bluntly. No one should have to concentrate on stuff you're not finding interesting for more than 45mins because after then my eyelids start to droop. I think the biggest problem for me is that I've done everything we're going over at the moment before (and I remember it). You don't need to have a full undergrad degree in economics to do Masters in Economics though and some people have been out of university for a few years so it is important to recap before we move on. But still! It's quite a relief when it's over.

Such is a typical Wednesday and so ends my rather random post.