So much for school

It seems like I haven't been posting my own thoughts on here very much the last few months. I kind of feel like for any thoughts I have, there's always somebody who has already said it better, so I just link to them. Bleh.

I decided to drop my class. Success in that course depends on a comfort level with math that I just don't have right now. To illustrate consider this excerpt from some class notes:




I can understand that, but just barely. It takes me a long time to read it and make any sense of it, but in class they fly through it in less than half the time it would take for me to understand it. (By the way, if you're actually trying to understand it, there's some information missing that was on another page of notes, so don't go crazy.)

It's kind of like a foreign language that I used to speak reasonably well, but it has been years since I've used it. And I could probably pick it up again fairly quickly in the right setting. But instead of being in the right setting, I'm thrust into some French government meeting and asked to report on the proceedings. It is just too much to try to relearn the French language while using it to try to understand other advanced concepts.

I decided to sign up for it in the first place for two reasons. One, to get a flavor for what the first year in an Economics PhD program would be like and see if I'd want to do that. And two, by getting an A in this class I'd greatly improve my application to such a program. But after a couple lectures it was obvious to me that getting an A would be probably the most daunting academic challenge of my life, and I'm just not willing to pay $1500 on such a gamble, especially on the first class I've taken in over 4 years. And to the first point, I'm not positive that I'd want to do this anyway.

To get an A in this class I think I'd need a refresher on calculus, linear algebra, and statistics. Then I'd need to probably learn a lot more about multivariate calculus and real analysis than I ever learned. I suppose it might have been possible for me to try to struggle through this class, study the math on my own and try to apply it as I go. I really hated dropping it. It wounds my pride. I liked being in a class, if only for a week. I'm hoping I can find a way to take some other class that won't be so overwhelming.

I start my new job tomorrow. I'm going to have to somehow wake up at like 7:30am, which won't be fun.