the little engine that could

In the past four days I have aged 20 years... -me to my best friend Rachel

One of the curses of taking a semester's worth of graduate-level statistics and economics squeezed into one month is that the sheer volume of material covered is not accompanied by the appropriate amount of time for me to digest and master it. One of the blessings, though, is that I'm already, essentially, halfway through the course. Thank God. Whew.

After the first week of instruction, I was feeling very defeated and discouraged. To add insult to injury, over the weekend we had two problem sets, one for statistics and one for economics, that were driving me up the wall! 

The assignments themselves were pretty interesting and relevant. We were analyzing the change in global public debt following the financial crisis in 2007-2008, the success of universities to provide pathways to economic mobility to low-income students, the accuracy of HIV tests to provide true positives and true negatives, the total cost of hurricanes (damage cost) in the U.S., and the effects of rent control measures and taxes on specific goods. However, multiple times throughout the weekend I became very frustrated as I got "stuck" on parts of certain problems. It was a lot of trial and error trying to get the math right and trying to figure out how to accomplish the things I wanted to through Excel. Excel is still my best frenemy (but thanks for the keyboard shortcuts, Gretchen!). 

But worry not! The purpose of this blog post is not just to complain about my first world problems of "struggling" in my graduate studies at a selective private university. Friday night I had a soul-healing conversation with a friend who is not in the Master of Public Affairs program. Over some delicious Korean fried chicken wings and drumsticks, I told her all about my first week and she was so empathetic. It was nice to sit back, laugh, and talk about feelings rather than numbers!! What a breath of fresh air. Thanks, Ellen!

I'm also incredibly thankful to have found some classmates to work on the problem sets with, even if that meant working with my classmate for an hour on the hurricanes problem, only to find out that we were doing all of the math wrong. What matters is that we arrived at the correct answers eventually. There's something so satisfying about putting in the hours to persevere and finally figuring it out in the end. 

I still had to skip church on Sunday and work non-stop through 1:00am Monday to complete everything, but the sense of accomplishment I feel now that we've gotten our grades back? Priceless.

I would also be remiss to neglect thanking the folks back home who were able to both pray for me and cheer me on from afar. My dad gave me a pep talk on Sunday morning that helped me power through the tears. Shauna Malwae-Tweep, you're my inspiration. 

This week I've spent my free time slowly working through math problems that we work through in class and the problems that are a part of online quizzes we take before class. I get stressed out when I'm in a group of people and everyone seems to be rocketing through questions when I'm still on part (1)(a). I've come to an acceptance that I complete things at slower pace than others, and that's okay. This may come back to haunt me when trying to complete the final exam in the time limit of three hours, but I won't worry about that for now. As Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." He knew what he was talking about!!

In terms of school-life balance, I'm still working on it... I will try and have "fun" this weekend, I guess. Frivolity? Never heard of it!!

Until next time...

a steep learning curve

"God be with us all..." -me to my fellow classmates

This one-month joint economics and statistics course is no joke! Today was the first day of instruction and in the course of 14 hours I have already experienced both joy and despair.

I started bright and early, meeting a classmate at 8:00am to complete the assigned readings. I did poorly on one of the timed assessments meant to see how much we had understood from the reading, which rattled me. We then had two hours of lecture on descriptive statistics (histograms, mean, median, mode, standard deviation), and I found it difficult to keep up. At first I attempted to raise my hand to answer the professor's questions, but after getting as much wrong as I had gotten right, I decided to just sit there and kept my damn mouth shut.

I had one moment of passing self-doubt that maybe I just wasn't cut out of this kind of work because it did not come to me easily. I felt panicked at the possibility that even with my best effort (putting in time and dedication to study and practice), I might still not be able to do well in this course (or other quantitative courses in the fall).

The afternoon was much better than the morning because I was able to understand more about probabilities than I had been able to grasp about descriptive statistics in the morning. It was also helpful to work through some practice problems after class and thankfully, I started arriving at the correct answers.

A student who graduated from the program this year advised me that in this next month I would need to "pick and choose my battles." I interpreted that to mean that it's likely that I won't be able to do all the assigned readings as thoroughly as I'd like, nor get as good of a score on pre-class assessments as I'd want, nor perfectly complete lab exercises as I'd wish. Because statistics and economics are not my strong suit, I will need to be okay with "passing" rather than "exceeding expectations" (though I can't mess up too much--we're not allowed to get lower than a 3.0 in any course in order to graduate!).

So I put this into practice today.

• From 8:00am-10:00am I studied
• From 10:00am-12:00pm I was in lecture
• From 12:00pm-12:30pm I ate lunch
• From 12:30pm-2:00pm I studied
• From 2:00pm-4:00pm I was in lecture
• From 4:00pm-6:30pm I studied.

When I got home to eat dinner, rather than working relentlessly from 7pm-10pm, I decided to walk to the grocery store to get ingredients for dinner tomorrow (spaghetti squash primavera with quinoa if you were wondering). That tiny break outside in the sun, listening to some of my favorite music, was so therapeutic. Could I have spent that time studying? Sure! I'm glad that I didn't.

Tomorrow will be four hours of lecture on economic concepts and methods. So far it seems a little bit easier to understand than statistics, but it's too early to tell.

This next month will be so challenging! I already know that I will struggle. Nevertheless I am resolved to try and not give up, even when it gets tough.

Thank you so much for your text messages, emails, letters and postcards! They do wonders for my morale.

Until next time...

the calm before the storm

Fun times in Providence, Newport and Boston

It's been about a week since arriving in New England and what an adventure it has been already!

Mom, Dad and I had a fun time exploring Providence and the nearby town, Newport, which has some incredible historic mansions. But most exciting of all, while we were eating lunch, guess who was also there? It was none other than the U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse! I couldn't believe it and was completely starstruck! Since he often works closely with Senator Maria Cantwell on environmental legislative issues, I had watched him multiple times on C-SPAN 2 delivering speeches on the Senate floor. Nothing compares to seeing him in real life, though! Wow, what a great way to start out this trip.

 

Saturday was an opportunity to be the ultimate tourists in Boston with my cousin Connor, who's originally from Chicago but living in the area currently. I had to beg my dad not to go on the Duck Tour though we did have lunch at the bar that the sitcom Cheers is based on. Most important, though, is that we clocked in over 15,000 steps! 

On Sunday we visited Providence Presbyterian Church, which is where I'm considering attending during my time at Brown. I met a lot of nice people and found some fun connections. One woman went to Regent College, which is where my pastor in Seattle went! She is also on staff with Intervarsity. 

Later I showed my parents around Brown's campus, though I can't say I know it very well. I'm living within walking distance of the Watson Institute, where a majority of my classes will be. I'm living on the second floor of a house with a couple of graduate students. Overall it's a really nice setup! 

Stray observations from orientation

This entire week is dedicated to Master of Public Affairs student orientation before we dive into economics and statistics next week. The first two days have been jam packed--I've left the house at 8:00am and gotten back around 8:00pm. Here are some of my first impressions:

• I find it both amusing and charming to be surrounded by so many eggheads. Everywhere I look, another egghead. I am among my people!!
• Brown is very different from the University of Washington. I don't know what else to say other than I am receiving a cultural education in New England old money. It's fascinating.
• The professors here are honestly very inspiring to hear from and confirm that I'm in the right place. Without question they possess extraordinary intellect but what has impressed me most has been their clear sense of passion for effecting positive change.

I sense there will be both tremendous opportunity as well as challenge as I go through this next year. I am genuinely looking forward to learning all that I can and am enjoying this new environment.

Thanks for reading! Bye!