Some observations from my Macro class this afternoon:

1) taking Saturday classes sucks. You would think that after I was subjected to Saturday classes at Hotchkiss I would have learned better. But no, for the second quarter in a row I somewhat willingly have endured classes from 1-4 on Saturday afternoons.

2) I am amazed by the students in the evening program. Not only do they take classes from 9am-4pm every Saturday all year, they also live outside of Chicago. That's right: they fly or drive to Chicago every weekend for the pleasure of subjecting themselves to a Saturday inside window-less classrooms.

3) Window-less classrooms. My 4th quarter is drawing to a close. I am more than 1/3 through the academic requirements for an MBA from The University of Chicago and this is just now beginning to bother me. I know windows would be distracting (lecture on macro vs. view of the Chicago skyline or river. hmmmm) and would distort the AV, but it's beginning to make me feel like I go to school in a box. It's a clear design choice: all the lounges, study rooms, libraries and cafes have windows, the classrooms do not.

4) In today's class of 51 people there were 10 women, and 20 people who were not born in the US. This seems to be the demographic of most of my classes. The official statistics reported in Business Week indicate it is 26% female and 24% international students, however. It also says 46% are married, which seems slightly lower than I've noticed. I am also the only person in either of my classes this quarter born after 1976. Since I was at enrollment the 3rd youngest person in my program, this should not surprise me.

5) The woman sitting next to me in class is 7 months pregnant. And she has a toddler at home who was sick all last night. Then she got on a plane at 6am to come to class (see pt. #2). I'm impressed when I manage to do all my reading, and she's way ahead of me in terms of comprehension.

6) I knew that enrolling in b-school would mean relearning the statithics Mith Marthall thaught me. I expected it would mean I had to learn about derivitaves (both mathematical and financial). I knew my basic algebra and geometry skills would be useful. I have completely forgotten everything I ever learned about logs. So there was a large part of class today where I was copying things down without the slightest clue where they came from.

7) appropos to nothing, in the middle of class today someone raised his hand. When called upon he said "so this means that Germany could have done it even without the Marshall plan?" My professor seemed to understand where the comment came from and went into great detail. The rest of us, with our vague recollections of the Marshall plan and absolutely no sense of how it fit into the equations on the board, wondered if that would be on the exam.

8) This same student later argued that the technological growth during the cold war was greater than that as a result of WWII. It took several exasperating minutes to get him to admit than when you looked at the time frames involved his point was a) meaningless and b) irrellevant

9) Someone actually tried to argue that the relative slowdown in growth rates after 1973 is due in part to the fact that women are less efficient workers. The professor quickly diffused that and moved on, but...um...yeah.

10) My favorite part of class was when Prof. said "these are good questions you all are asking. You should just understand that we macroeconomists don't actually know any of the answers."

will that be on the exam?

11) I've felt like an outsider in this whole b-school thing from the beginning. I work for a theater, for fucks sake. I want to work at non-profits. I will single handedly drive down the post-graduation starting salay of my cohort (Chicago GSB grads typically start with 6-digit salaries). And I'm not a finance geek. I managed to get through undergrad at the U of C without ever taking an econ class. So I'm more than an anomoly, I'm kind of a fish out of water. But, um, it's been a year, so that excuse doesn't really hold. The letter from the dean congratulating me on getting honors (top 15% of the school) means I actually am on the inside, I suppose.

12) If my life is divided between work (say, 50 hours/wk), school (6 hours class, + homework), social activity/play, and sleep (c. 45 hours a week), am I dividing my time correctly? The average student claims to spend 10 hours/wk on homework, not counting studying for exams. There are 168 hours in a week. Subtracting time spent sleeping and at work and physically in class I have 67 hours left to allocate. I spend about an hour/day commuting, so down to 60 (allowing that I don't commute sundays, and it's actually a little more than 30 minutes each way, when you include parking). 10 hours/wk on homework means I spend 50 hours/wk playing. Really? I do? Lets see, time spent fooling around on the internet...too much... watching re-runs on TV...about an hour a day...reading...not enough...with my boyfriend...about right...with other friends...not enough...on the phone to friends out of town...not enough...paying bills...doing household chores...
I did that during class today. I suspect I was supposed to be learning about the Solow residual. Or yet one more reason why tax cuts are bad but increased spending is worse and all economic decisions should be left to the fed (it should be noted that when my prof. is in residence at chicago he works for the Fed).
See pt. #1 above

13) If I hear "and that's all there really is to it" one more time, I might scream. Especially since my prof always says this right after drawing some complicated graph that no one in the class understands.

Ok, enough.
- posted by Heidi @ 6:03 PM