After a two-week travel to Paris, Rome and Naples, it is still hard for me to recover from the exam hell… Although the scores are somehow acceptable, at least no B, I’m still depressed and have experienced such a painful time period in the past week. Finally, I began to force myself to work. My schedule was like 8 hours for class, 2 hours for reading papers and 6 hours for coding. Then, go to sleep. Keeping myself busy may not be a bad way at present, otherwise I will lose myself in the low mood.

Fortunately, I have decided which courses to take in this semester: Advanced Micro, Advanced Macro, Econometric Methods and Topics in development. I know I’m going to kill myself at the end of this semester. So what? Given the fact that this year would be the last year for me to stay in the ivory tower, I’d better crap as much as I can… And to be honest, although I love the teacher, the topics and the way they are going to evaluate for the course of political economics,  I don’t want to listen for 8 continuous hours on Thursday, or Wednesday if I take behavioral… and I have two political economics courses listed on my undergraduate transcripts, and so are labor, development, IO, etc… Not until now have I realized how many courses I have gone through in the past 2 years, although the levels of difficulty are not comparable. After all, Ghazala Azmat is an amazing teacher – she knows how to teach! I love her a lot…

Cannot see the future… Received a job offer, and the job sounds interesting, at least directly related to social network. However, still not excited. I don’t know why. Don’t want to continue a Ph.D in the following year, although I have applied for two econ Ph.D programs anyway. Well, I’m reading econ job humors and testmagic at the same time- one for Ph.D application, one for job market. Those who are going to Ph.D programs have a lofty dream about their lives in the following future, somehow like what I was expecting last year; on the other hand, the job market is not optimistic. Consider the current and recent economic situations in the U.S. and European, fewer and fewer job opportunities are available on the market, which means the competition will be more and more cruel,  since demand decreases while supply nearly remains the same. I’m a little worried about the situation which might be true: 31 years old, only a shining Ph.D title with zero work experience, no idea with how to apply previous researches to the real market, and no effective social links outside of academia. Particularly, for me, as a girl… I don’t want to imagine any more.

I’m glad there are so many people in the world that care about me – at least after a post describing my sentiment posted on my Chinese blog, I have received several responses that encourage me to go out of the pitfall and stay strong. However, the fact is always ironic: I know exactly where my problem is, and what I should do. But, it is just I cannot act as what I am supposed to be. They always say that the outsiders can see things clearly while the insiders are always confused. I am sure although I am informed by my dear friends which kind of situations I am in at present, still, I cannot get myself off… Sorry!

Maybe I should end up here. So many passive words… If my memory is right, I was a really optimistic person by any means. How could I have changed that much in such a short period – only 4 months since I came here, Barcelona. No answer. No time fore beach, no time for Sagrada Familia, and no energy to go shopping. No good… Hope the second semester would not be gloomy – in terms of the pressure I need to stand. Still, I won’t be despairing.

p.s. There is a brief feeling of the Master in Economics program in Barcelona GSE attached, written by one of my friend when replied someone else. Just FOR FUN!

Here’s my opinion (you may want to sit down for this) – be prepared to feel a sense of loss. Loss of time, loss of energy, and loss of patience for teachers (and TAs) who just…hmmm, how to delicately put this…don’t live up to your lofty (but well-deserved) expectations. Let me be a bit more specific:

1. Barcelona is a beautiful city…so I have heard. Never really been around much. (and I am, or at least, I was, an adventurous person). I live 5 minutes away from the beach – been to the beach only during the first week when they had “La Merce” festival. That’s all. Not seen the Sagrada Familia yet, and I can see it out of my window every morning – that’s just pathetic.
2. Out of the three Econ Theory professors, two of them are completely incomprehensible (actually, one of them can be understood on a good day…but it has to be a REALLY good day. The other one – forget it. Even native Spaniards cannot understand a word that he’s saying). But on a positive note, I have heard that this year was a DRASTIC IMPROVEMENT compared to the living hell that last year’s students had to live through (last year’s Nazi of a teacher believed that MWG was for little children’s bedtime story). As for our Econ Theory TA…let’s just say that he is unbelievable/ungelivable…and not in a good way.
3. Be prepared to buy (or cheaply download/print) a LIBRARY of books. Or, more simply, be prepared to buy a Kindle to store about 30 PDFs of books/chapters/documents/articles/anything else that may be of use FOR ONE PART OF ONE COURSE! That’s correct – not one semester, not one course, but one PART of one course. We switch often from MWG (Chapters 1-6, 10-12, and appendices) to Jehle/Reny (the entire book except for chapter 1) to Rubinstein (the entire thing) to Gibbons (the entire book) to Osborne/Rubinstein to Tirole ALL FOR ONE COURSE!
   On the other hand, for econometrics, the professor was not as ambitious – we only went through about 10 chapters of Cameron/Trivedi, 6 chapters of Davidson/MacKinnon, some chapters in Wooldridge (not baby Wooldridge), 3 chapters in Amemiya, a chapter or so in Hayashi, plus various articles/journals/other handouts (by the way, MEMORIZE the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem before you come – it’s the most sacred and life-saving theorem ever). Did I mention that this list is only for Microeconometrics? For time-series (which is ironically completed in 3 weeks), we went through about 11 chapters of Hamilton.
4. Teach yourself STATA as soon as possible. In fact, while you’re at it, teach yourself economics as soon as possible. That’s all.
5. Be prepared to get a completely arbitrary set of grades. I answered one and a half questions out of six on my econ theory final exam and managed to pass…how does this happen, you may ask? I am still asking myself this question. Additionally, on the econometrics part, there was a time when I felt like circling both “all of the above” and “none of the above” for the same multiple-choice question.
6. You will find yourself asking the following questions VERY often:
   • a. Why am I here?
   • b. What would have happened if I wasn’t here?
   • c. What the hell is economics?
   • d. Why do I care about the answer to c?
   • e. When was the last time that I slept for more than 4 hours in a night (or, as the case for many of us, in the morning)?
7. You will find yourself answering the following questions VERY often:
   • a. If you’re the only person (effectively Robinson Crusoe the firm and the consumer) on a deserted island, and you have 1 unit of labor to make bananas, but you don’t like bananas…how many apples do you consume in a period?
   • b. Replicate two Nobel Prize-winning authors’ results from their publications (due to data restrictions, you cannot get the same answer by any stretch of the imagination; however, you must replicate the results, nonetheless).

NOTE: This is only for the first semester…it took two weeks in Paris and Rome to partially recover from this trauma. And mind you, there not two, but THREE semesters that you must go through at BGSE. If you want, we can tell you how the second circle of hell feels like…soon.