My Life Update

As it is now winter break for the grad students among us, it's time for our life updates!

As most/maybe all of you heard, I managed to pass my comps last spring, which meant that I got to kick back, sit around, and relax all quarter... oh wait, that's what I thought it meant. Turns out it meant that I got to work my butt off again last quarter, only this time I worked on slightly more advanced/specific projects and managed to feel like I didn't accomplish much along the way.

The second year of my program is all about finding your little niche in the world of economics. Everyone in the program takes the general "macro, micro, metrics" classes in the first year and then we all split off taking classes like "behavioral and experimental economics" or "international macroeconomics" or "industrial organization." I started off the quarter taking three classes: behavioral and experimental economics, econometrics (i.e. statistics), and industrial organization. I also decided to sit in on a matching and market design class to see if I thought it would be an interesting class to take later on. By the end of the quarter, I was auditing the economics class, had dropped the industrial organization class, and was taking the matching and market design class along with the behavioral and experimental class. My quarter was all about finding research projects, and I went through about 25 ideas for a research proposal for my behavioral class, which meant that I skimmed the surface of a lot of areas of economics and meant that I felt like I didn't accomplish much. But I'm entering next quarter with 4-5 research projects that I can launch into and hopefully turn from ideas to papers to... hopefully published papers. I won't punish everyone by describing the ideas in this post, but since some of you seemed interested I might do another post or two talking about my research proposal (and so I can get the "Isaac being nerdy" to be the most used label...)

As for the social life, it was wonderful to go back to Stanford and have a group of friends all ready there as opposed to last year. But then classes started and I stopped spending much time with any of them. Unlike last year, this year includes a lot of projects that you do on your own, which obviously means that it is much more isolating that last year. As busy/stressful as last year was, the long days of difficult problems sets was a great bonding experience, and part of me misses that comradery (although all told, I'm so f-ing glad that the first year is done). Michael is completely right about the community aspect, and how it feels like the community aspect of my life is missing a bit right now. So I think I've figured out the solution; everyone just come to San Fran! It'd be so much fun!

All in all, I had a good quarter and am in a good place. Academically, I feel like I've finally found a few project to fully devote my time researching. Socially, there are a wonderful people at Stanford, and it's coming slowly. That said, I'm still missing the hell out of all of you guys and it's no accident that when describing my quarter I was able to write a massive paragraph about my academics and only a small one describing my social life.