« Back in The Saddle (with some random observations) | Main | More About the Baltics and the CEE »
Tuesday
21Oct2008

Swamped ...

DateTuesday, October 21, 2008 at 10:49PM

I guess you may have noticed that activity has hit a trough here at Alpha.Sources. The reason? Well, apparently, you author has managed to position himself right smack in the middle of a viper's nest in the form of the first year courses of the MSc in Economics at HEC Lausanne. Actually, this should not be a problem since yours truly is actually a second year MSc student, but alas; when the world is defined exclusively in terms of lagrange multipliers, Kuhn-Tucker conditions, open balls (!?), eigenvectors, as well as the odd Cramér-Rao bound the time allocated to blogging (indeed thinking independently!) has to go down. Indeed, sometimes, yours truly wonders whether the modern form of catharsis represented by leafing through the finer arts of Neo-Classical economics is really one big contradiction with respect to the much hailed principle of marginal utility analysis?

If you smell a cry-baby somewhere here it would be unfair, although there is always(!) a bigger fish. As such, your humble author has no problem whatsoever admitting his inferior skills with respect to algebra and calculus relative to his peers at the same time as he can safely conclude that he has learned more quantitative "stuff" in the past two months than during an entire year (well, lifetime actually) at his program in Copenhagen.

So, he will keep on moving forward and here is to hoping that blogging can be kept at a minimum as we move towards christmas.

AuthorCV | Comment2 Comments | Reference1 Reference |
in

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

References (1)

References allow you to track sources for this article, as well as articles that were written in response to this article.
  • Response
    Response: Some Random Thoughts on Deflation
    at The Market Traders on November 21, 2008
    Edward Hugh submits: Today marks precisely one month that yours truly noted that he was swamped. He still is, but even though your author is still struggling to meet the quantitative demands of neo-classical graduate economics (especially, the statistical

Reader Comments (2)

Do your best at the math stuff, it's basically intro. PhD material (especially the topology) and I guess some of the students are looking to continue if they pass exams. We have one-year Mathematical Finance programs here in the USA that try to do CAPM and Stochastic Calculus. The students emerge totally confused but the best ones will integrate the material and start to understand it some time after they graduate from the one-year program. To become competent at it requires more time even for those students.
November 16, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterDavid Quinn
Hi david,

Thanks for the encouragement. I am still hanging on and of course, can only do my best. I am slowly getting the hang of it although I am suffering from this mantra that while I know the rules, I don't know the tricks.

Anyway, I am sure when it all settles I will be happy that I did it.

And after Tuesday's midterm I am adamant in returning to the keyboard!

best

Claus
November 16, 2008 | Unregistered Commentercv

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.