Here I am in grad school. Well, I am at Emory, trying to eventually in 5 years or so get a PhD in Economics. And here I want to tell you about some of my 'successes' and things I learned.
Our professors are very intelligent. Just take my macro professor. When he joined the department, its ranking by publications went up by some 20 places. And now he is teaching us calibrations, pareto optimal social planning, social planning in general, dynamic optimization, Bellman equations, and a whole bunch of other things. However, when asked about his opinion on the Austrian view of the Great Depression, the professor's response after additional 5 clarifying questions, was that we may perhaps talk about the Great Depression in Italy, but that he does not believe that Austria had a Great Depression... Otherwise he is probably really good though.
Or our Stats professor. I think that he ranks among the top 10% of economists in the world. Pretty cool. And he also teaches as one.
Or our Chicago-grad micro professor who makes his own micro models (do not confuse for micro-processor). Also very intelligent and loves to give 'tricky' exam questions.
And then here is my class... half made of geniuses with master's degrees in economics and other areas, or with PhDs in physics, and half composed of your 'average guys' (ok, your average PhD students). Hmm, if you don't know which group I am in, try to guess.
I have realized how funny it is to have your 'average guys' be taught by top economists. Well, it is funny if you, like me, like dark humor. Just consider the grades. Our first micro exam ended with a median of 59% (I was the median btw.). Or our first statistics exam where grades spanned from 99% to 7% (I had again my average 56%). And now the macro midterm... where the class distribution of grades looked like this:
Just in case you can't see, the column tags read '70-80', '60-70', '50-60', and 'below 40' and the 'y axis' tells you the number of students within this percentage.
There are good things to compensate for our/my failures though. The lowest grade is B- and grading is done on a scale so, as I like to say, if we all failed we all did well.
And now, back to studying!
