2018

My 2018 began with fear—of not being good enough.

You see, it was the end of my first semester in the graduate program, and I barely squeaked by. So I spent my winter break vacillating between various plan Bs. I tried to clutch hard to my plan A, too, which was how I ended up stress-studying myself in the library in the dead of winter. (It's super not effective!)

I also turned thirty, with little fanfare. Freida was in Pakistan, which meant she couldn’t really make a celebration fuss. The weather was icy, but I managed to steal some snuggles from Misty.

At the end of January, the spring term started. I took Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Econometrics—the usual—but it’s one fewer class than what some of my classmates were taking. We covered money, labor search, and taxation in macro; and game theory and principal-agent problems in micro. I remembered doing so much matrix manipulation in metrics that made it too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. My preparation for the metrics midterm was the entirety of my spring break.

I spent most of my waking hours on campus. When I tracked my hours, I often end up with 70-80 hours of work/study per week. I recalled previously having RAs submit more than 200 hours of work in a month was a cause of concern. Here it became a matter of course.

I only begrudgingly took care of the human-pet within. Preparing meals was a chore, doing laundry was a chore, showering was a chore. They still are.

The semester ended in May. But we had three weeks between then and the qualifying exams on June 1st and 5th. They were the bane of our existence, and for me especially so because I understand so little about growth theories from macro and preferences from micro in the first semester. Nevertheless, some things did make better sense on my second go of the materials.

My recollections of the actual exams themselves are now a blur, save for one: I remember being thoroughly annoyed at the macro exam. There was no way anyone could have finished that exam in three hours. I had also thought that the materials for the second half of the spring term would draw on the labor search because it was the only part where the professor bothered to assign problem sets. So did the exam test us on labor search? Of course not.

But they did mark the end of the first year, and we had a party at our house afterward. There were booze, and there were resigned relief. It was out of our hands, but there’s nothing we could do but wait until they announced the result.

The people that I talked to mentioned a 2-3 week gap between the exams and the announcement. That suited me fine, as I had planned to be traveling to Pittsburgh in mid-June for a Duolingo event. I was hoping the announcement would reach me when I was away from Boston. You see, I was worried.

So it was a surprise to find an email titled “June 2018 Qualifying Exam Results” from our program administrator in my inbox a mere week after the exam. I dreaded it, but I was still too exhausted to keep myself in suspense. Holding my breath, I tapped it open.

You know, Jane gets it.

Now that it was out of the way, though, summer can earnestly start. I had so many things planned: books to read, personal projects to launch, places to explore, exercises to do, and a research assistantship to sink my teeth in! (Yeah, I never learn how to not ruin my holidays with task babies.)

Maybe it was overly ambitious. But I did get to read some books, go places (Pittsburgh and Cleveland), do a couple of HEMA practices, and work with BU’s computing cluster. That last bit made me learn the basics of SGE, python, and git. I had a busy summer, and I didn’t really mind spending most of my time in the inferno that is room 523. Honestly, the old AC unit fanned in more noise than cool air.

I would be remiss, though, to not mention the one thing that is both my source of joy and heartbreak: the Indonesian course for English speakers on Duolingo. It had been three years in the making. I spent countless weekends working on various parts of the course: the curriculum, the contributors, the actual sentences. I screened (and in some cases, interviewed) applicants and recruited a dozen different contributors. I reached out to Indonesian language teachers and linguistic students, pored over different language textbooks and repositories. I organized words in lesson units, then wrote and translated thousands of sentence-pairs to teach to users. I think that the hardest part was having no one to bat around ideas with. It was voluntary, and it was lonely.

This was where the heartbreak came in. As we nearly completed the Indonesian tree, I wanted to get their support in launching the course. I looked at courses like the Hindi course, which received widespread publicity, and learned that staff had taken the initiative during the launch. I was hoping to get similar support… and received none of the sorts. It was very demotivating. Aku si pungguk yang merindukan bulan dan cintaku bertepuk sebelah tangan.

Had that been the end of my summer, it would have been a good/terrible end. But Freida and I had a plan to go on a hike with Cori along the Appalachian Trail. We hiked through the highest ground in Connecticut, a not-strenuous-at-all 2354 ft above sea level, although Cori unfortunately injured her ankle during the hike. Thus endeth the summer.

The Fall term started after Labor Day. I took four courses, and Development soon proved to be the most interesting one (the other three were Econometrics, Health Economics, and Public Finance). I had never taken much interest in microcredit, but as we covered the literature I began to realize how puzzling it is, which is why many are actively researching this area. I got an interesting conversation with my sister back home about her experience with microcredit loans, too.

My workload piled on pretty quickly. I had hoped to avoid getting back on the coffee wagon again but really I didn’t have a chance. Much to my dismay, I realized I couldn’t afford to spare the time to continue going to HEMA practices on Mondays—oh well maybe I’ll try again next year when I no longer have to take classes. Mbak Lina and Mbak Milda visited Boston and took Freida and me for a weekend trip to the White Mountain—which gave them ample opportunities to make sniping comments as we tried to squeeze in school works during the trip. We suffered them gamely.

There were two practical things I learned this semester: how to write a referee report, and how to go exhaust myself. The first one is hard because in my perspective refereeing is predicated on knowing the existing literature so you can make the correct call on the manuscript you’re refereeing. What do I—a new transplant in the economics discipline—know about the literature? So for every refereeing task, I end up having to wade through a sea of papers just to eke out a couple of cogent criticism. I’m sure as I get more familiar with the literature it may get easier, but in the meantime, I have resigned to devote a lot of time to prepare them.

The second practical thing was easy: I had been picking up languages and software since the summer, and it was not until halfway through the fall term that I realized the many languages I tried to pick up made switching tasks extra costly. I had mentioned (1) Python and (2) SGE; but I also dabbled with (3) Git, (4) Tableau, and (5) Swift. I had to learn (6) SAS for health economics, and I chose (7) Mata to work with matrices in econometrics. But I was still working mainly with (8) Markdown, (9) LaTeX, and of course (10) Stata. I’ve got so much stuff on my plate that there’s no way to chew it all properly.

(In all honesty, though, the econometrics class was also very practical, and it made me wonder why there aren’t more econometricians in the government carefully analyzing impact evaluations. (The answer was evident: the interests of econometricians and governments hardly overlap.))

This Fall semester had been far more enjoyable than last year’s Fall, though it was still exhausting. The last few weeks of the term were the worst: after spending the Thanksgiving break studying for a Development exam, in the following three weeks I had three presentations, a research proposal, two problem sets, a referee report, a term paper, and an econometric final exam. I wanted nothing but to veg out and play with other people’s cats until the new year.

Now that the new year is past, I am happy that I managed to do just that. Happy New Year.