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...