I finally got confirmation that I had passed my last subject. I got 55. I brought my overall average to 75.710. It was close, but I managed to finish uni with a distinction average.

I am trying to decide what major I should have. I have done enough subjects to get any of the economics majors, but I can only pick one.

• Econometrics
• Economics
• Financial Economics
• Economics and Econometrics

Which one sounds the most fancy? The last one uses up the most courses, but it doesn't sound that fancy to me. I can probably get a minor in accounting or something as well.

I got my final marks. I did pretty good. Econometric Theory must have some crazy weighting though.

I finished my final exam today. Even if I failed ECON3203 I will pass ECON3206 good. So my major might be Financial Economics instead of Econometrics, but I'm not that fussed.

So no honours or double degree for me. Six years indeed! What was I thinking?

It's not actually a full goodbye. I will be working here two days a week at two different jobs next year. One job is econometrics and one job is packing vegetables snug into boxes.

I am so tempted to delete the University folder from my computer.

My second last exam was super-quick. I finished it in one hour even though it was a three hour exam. Although to say I "finished" it may be a little misleading. What I mean by finished is that I stopped writing.

I need to get 4 out of 50. I'm feeling fairly confident, but it will be tight.

Normally I get upset when I get 100% for an assignment, because I feel like they mustn't have really read it and I could have worked heaps less hard. It's like at TAFE when they tell you that you're brilliant for putting a full stop at the end of every single sentence and using capital letters in the right places. You don't feel as chuffed as their enthusiasm should lead you to be. But when it happens in ECON3203 I don't mind nearly so much, because in this subject I have become a Percentage Player.

It's good because it makes my mark so far 80%. Which means I only need to get 8% in my final exam to pass the course. It is sad that this is much less reassuring than you might think. Fingers crossed that the final is like the mid-session exam.

Wouldn't it be funny if I got 8% in my final exam and then went off to work for the government and build econometric models and tell them how to run the economy. Funny enough that I'd like to go and get that job just for the giggles.

I passed my econometrics mid-session exam. 60%. Sweet.

Update: I got her to look at my paper again and I actually got 70%.

I did the mid-session exam for econometrics. So much easier than last time. I had time to do all the questions I understood and I understood more than none. I might even pass it.

Yesterday I decided I would spend a day working at uni. So I got up early and prepared to head off. However, before I made it to work I got a little distracted. Libby had stayed the night and she didn't want to go to work too early, so we went and had a coffee for a while. Then I said goodbye to Libby and headed back to the house to get ready for work. I found Jo sitting in the sun on the balcony and decided I'd just sit down for a little while and read The End of Poverty. Then some Jehovah's Witnesses came and told as that the future of humanity was surprisingly rosy looking.

At that point I really had to leave because I had a shift at the food coop at 12pm helping out with the vegies. It was a two hour shift, so it would eat into my work time a little, but I wasn't planning to leave work until 9pm, so it wasn't the end of the world. At the coop I distributed vegies, squashed boxes and chatted with a few people. And then 5pm had arrived and it was time to go to the energy coop meeting. I still hadn't quite made it to work, but I would. The energy coop meeting took another hour and the guys there were talking about this climate change lecture on that night by the chairman of the IPCC. So I went to that. The lecture was quite interesting, but didn't finish until 7:30pm.

Luckily the lecture hall was right across the path from my office, so I walked out of the lecture and was sitting as my desk a few minutes later at 7:35pm. After reading a few blogs and a little news I managed to get in a solid hour's work before Jo drove my home at 9pm.

1 hour / (9pm-8am) = 7.6% productivity

One of the best things about this semester is that instead of spending $250 or more on textbooks I only have to spend $15.50 on one development reader. My two other subjects are both using textbooks I already own. Combined with no more union fees I'm going to be so rich. I usually spend the first half of term catching up on all the beginning of term extravagance.

I find my job really difficult and mostly it just makes me unhappy. However, sometimes I really love coming into uni in the morning, getting a coffee (and occasionally a vegan muffin) and going to the office. I have a little heater for winter, a little air conditioner for summer and a fast computer. Compared to working in a coal mine or something it's not such a tough job at all.

Doing one less subject is good for my marks. I went from a pass average last semester to an HD average this semester. And this was a pretty crap semester as well.

I got my mark back for my silly research methods assignment, which I wrote nearly all of in the last 8 hours. I got 85 for it, even though I was ready to throw in the towel the night before. And the result was a mess. The writing style was appalling. Most of it didn't even get read over, so there were no drafts. I threw in whatever graphs I could think of. I hardly even answered the questions. Importantly, though, I copied as plagiaristically as possibly could from the example report. I put in everything they had ever suggested we put in a report. And it worked.

But my first assignment, which I did a lot of work on, I did crap in. I even made sense, and felt like I'd created a reasonable and useful research brief. I got 69 for that one. Stupid arbitrary world.

My first and hardest exam is over. It wasn't actually hard at all. I am very glad.

I think Vista is possibly even worse than WebCT. I don't remember WebCT requiring Java to run. And the sessions in Vista are so fragile. It's the only think I ever use that makes me restart the browser.

And it's damn ugly. Everything about it is ugly. It's messy and ugly. The URLs are ugly. The colours are ugly. The layout is ugly and impractical. It uses Javascript to break stuff in random places. There isn't a single component or idea that isn't substantially worse than average or what you'd expect.

And it doesn't actually do anything. I feel like I've written applications in a week that do more than Vista. Maybe there is a whole lot of fancy stuff going on behind the scenes which means the stuff we actually use has to suck, but I doubt it.

Vista lives up to every stereotype of the kind of bloated software favoured by large institutions. It pains me to use it. And I'm not being melodramatic.

Driving cars does wonders for my attitude towards buses. I spent rather a long time driving to university today and then rather a long time parking and then rather a long time walking from the car to the university. Approximately two hours and ten minutes all up. Although it was fun driving in the rain. I like it when everyone has to slow way down because their windscreen wipers aren't strong enough.

I think in future when I'm driving from Hornsby, I'll drive to Newtown and then catch a bus. It would have been way quicker today.

It also made me think about the welfare of parking spots. Parking for the day inside the university would have cost $6, which isn't that much but more than I can afford. There were heaps of other students driving around looking for a spot, just like me, presumably because it was too much for them too. But there were loads of spaces in the university parking building. More than half of several hundred spots would have been available. It strikes me as a sub-optimal use of space. For sure, student time is less valuable then lecturer time, but I don't think it's that much less valuable. Thirty minutes spent driving around still counts for something. I am able to easily catch a bus to uni, but for all those people who drive every day despite the trauma of parking I assume the bus would be even worse. So I reckon the world probably needs more buses, more bus routes, higher petrol prices and cheaper student parking for the students the other incentives don't convince.

Perhaps higher student income too. Saving $6 for 30 minutes effort feels like good value to me, but it isn't really. Although I don't feel like my income is too low. Maybe more sensible student consumption is the answer.

My pay at uni just keeps going up. I don't know if it's a union agreement or something. It's a little bit annoying though because I keep having to tell Centrelink that my income has gone up by $10 a fortnight so they can take it off my Austudy payment.

I've had a look at a few different things for stuffing around with matrix arithmetic. It's the sort of thing my degree has reduced me to. I've looked at Excel and R. I already know about Stata. At uni they think Matlab is pretty good. But I've found something better than all of them. Ruby. It's totally sweet.

require 'matrix'
Q = Matrix[[20, 30, 43],
           [20, 25, 10],
           [20, 10, 5]]
assets = Matrix[[10], [20]]
price = Matrix[[5, 10]]
portfolio = Q.inv * assets
cost = price * portfolio

Or some leet OLS. Oh yeah.

portfolio = (Q.t*Q).inv*Q.t*assets

Awesome eh? It probably seems more nifty to programmers and those who've tried matrices in Excel. Nasty. I even wrote a little Ruby library to make printing out the matrices prettier. Although probably if I count that extra time my average productivity drops quite a bit.

Ruby is pretty good all round. Kind of slow in spots. But that won't stop it from taking over the world pretty soon.

There was some rowdy discussion in my social theory tutorial this morning. It was a debate between - of all things - whether individuals are free or constrained by the culture around them. It went a little something like this.

Older woman: You're background really has a huge impact on your opportunities.
Younger woman: But it's basically about the individual. It's about personal choice.
OW: But out of the 500 people in my class, only 100 finished high-school.
YW: But you came to university, so the rest could have too.
OW: But I didn't come here until I was in my forties.
YW: But basically it's about the individual.
Another young woman: I think it's a personal decision. It's about the individual.
Another older woman: I had the same experience. I came from a working class background, and none of us went to university.
YW: But ultimately people have to choose for themselves. You had all the opportunities I did.
OW: But I don't think I did. I had to work harder.
YW: But it's about the individual.

And so on for about 30 minutes. I don't think anyone clicked that they were having the age-old debate about this stuff. Or that the subject we were studying was completely predicated on the belief that it isn't entirely up to the individual. Social theory is all about blaming the problems of individuals on systems.

It would have been more amusing if the debate hadn't been between two older working class women and bunch of young upper-middle class girls. It's never pleasant hearing the well off scold the poor for everything they fail to achieve.

I started the latest Monte Carlo at 1pm. It finished at 7:45pm, 20 minutes before the last bus home. I'm very fortunate.

A bunch (most) of the food outlets at my university have closed over the summer "because of VSU". But the awesome coffee stand is still open. I asked them about it and they said they had a couple fewer people working, and closed a bit earlier. Perhaps they're a good model for food outlets as well. You could have a falafel stand or a hotdog stand. You don't need a whole building to serve food, and there are enough places to sit down and eat takeaways.

Maybe the university needs fewer food outlets, but better scalability for the ones that remain. I think it's a little silly that all this time the busy periods have been subsidising the quiet periods so much. Were they keeping them open to boost the sense of community during the summer? If there aren't enough of us to keep the stores open, I think they should just close them - with or without VSU. If we have to walk up to Randwick that is fine. The food is better up there anyway.

Probably if the food here was normally really yummy, and I wasn't able to eat it during the holidays, I'd be really annoyed. You can be much more economically ruthless when your tummy isn't involved.

ECON2102    Macroeconomics 2                Session Two     6.0     55  PS
ECON3203    Econometric Theory              Session Two     6.0     19  FL
FINS1612    Capital Markets & Institution   Session Two     6.0     87  HD
ECON3114    Super and Retirement Benefits   Session Two     6.0     85  HD

Oh dear! What happened there. My first fail and my first pass in the same semester.

Uni is all finished for the year, and I am well pleased.

I got 95% for my superannuation paper. That makes me so happy. It's the knew highest mark I've got for a critical assignment. She sent an email to each of us with our mark. It was in a Word document and took ages to open, and the longer it took the lower I saw my mark falling. But she liked it. So yay.

I passed my first econometrics assessment this semester! I got 2.5/5. That's totally a pass mark. Yay! Although I failed my mid-session exam big time. So big time, that she ignored my mark when she told the class what the minimum mark was. The problem with getting a mark as low as mine, is that her deciding to scale us all will make absolutely no difference to me at all.

Wouldn't it be interesting to pick out students from high school at random and give them nifty university scholarships. The ones that got scholarships would be more likely to go to university, regardless of how clever or motivated they were. Then after 10 years you could go and see if they were making more money or being more productive or something. Then you'd know if university was useful or not. No one really knows if university is helpful. Economists kind of sort of think it's useful, but it's possible that university has no impact at all. Although even if university did earn you better money, it still might just be because you seem like a better proposition. Not because you actually are. So you wouldn't have all the answers. But at least you could say that university has more of an impact than just stealing the brightest kids from high school and then taking the credit for their brightness. Although now I think about it, you couldn't even do that. Those scholarship kids might simply get higher incomes because they went to the same institution that others smart kids went to. You'd need to use a university with no name brand recognition. Gee whiz. Practical economics sure is tricky. It's not wonder most economists focus on the impractical sort.

What would happen if, instead of looking at your UAI when you apply for university, they looked at your marks relative to the average mark in your postcode? I reckon that a lot of success at university is determined by personal characteristics and ability (which should be fairly independent of postcode) and not that much by absolute UAI (which is very dependent on postcode).

It would be good to have a way of removing the bias of high school quality and parenting resources from entry into university. If you were compared to the people in your postcode, rather than the people in your state, a lot of those extraneous-ish factors would be disregarded. I also suspect our universities will get higher quality students. I am certain that someone who gets a UAI of 80 where the average is 40 will generally do better at university that someone who gets 90 where the average is 90. University is all about effort, and a UAI isn't the best indicator of effort.

The other nice effect is that it would encourage all those North Shore parents who want their mediocre children to study medicine to move to Cabramatta. They'll be probably be horrified by the resources at the Cabramatta school they go to and so they might get together with the other North Shore refugees on the P&C to raise some extra money. Which would probably be an OK outcome. If you end up with educational equity instead of a "leg up" for capable kids in poor postcodes, that isn't the end of the world. You might even get the situation where North Shore parents are bribing Mt Druitt principals to let their kids in after their HSC trial results arrive. Which would be absolutely hilarious, and would totally make the whole system worthwhile by itself.

Two hours and 38 minutes into my econometrics study I have completed question 1 part b and c. Lucky I did part a the other day, or I would have been here all day. Now I only have questions 2 to 13 for chapter 3. And then the questions in chapters 4 through to 16 (minus 12, 13 and 14 thankfully). Rocking.

I've stopped studying for all my subjects. I need to study for econometrics the most because it's totally the hardest, and the only one I'm likely to drop this Wednesday. So I spend all my study time studying for that. But because it's so frightening, I don't study for it either. So I'm in a spot of bother. I've read and read the textbooks, but I seriously have very little idea what's going on in chapter 2, and we're up to chapter 11 and 16. I had to read the first chapters over and over, so I didn't get to the middle chapters like 4, 5, 6 and 8. You'd hope that would mean I had a good grasp of chapter 2. But it doesn't. We have this question that assessable and due on Thursday. I can look at it, and understand how incredibly easy it is. There are no tricks. It's totally straight-forward. But I have no idea how to start it.

Tuesday - I decided yesterday. that I would drop this course. I can't even do the homework questions, so I reckon I'll fail the exams. I went and told my lecturer I would drop it today and she was fine with it. I asked her if she knew anything about people who might do tutoring, but she didn't. I wonder if the reason she was so worried when my friend dropped out was that he did it before the date for financial penalty. In a class with 10 students, you have to worry about that sort of thing.

But the more I've thought about it, the more the risk of failing seems less important. I suspect it will prevent me from getting jobs, but maybe that's not as bad as having to spend an extra year or semester at uni. But maybe I have to forget about trying to do things well. I only have to understand the easiest 50% of the course. It feels like that must be achievable. I just wish I could find someone to explain it to me.

The went to the Economics Society careers day today. Everyone was obviously keen to work at Macquarie, but apart from the money I have no idea why they would want to. It sounded like an awful machine. I've heard it's actually a good place to work from someone who did work there, but the whole graduate pulper they have going sounds pretty unpleasant.

I also listened to some Ellis chap from the Reserve Bank talk about that. He thoroughly quashed any aspirations I had to work there. Which I guess is fortunate, because at the end he suggested getting first-class honours if you wanted a job there. I don't even know what first-class honours are, so I don't like my chances of getting some. If it's something to do with get high distinctions, then I want no part of it.

But there was a company called BIS Shrapnel that I liked. Mostly because of their name, but also because the guy was the only one who really made sense to me. I think I would like to work somewhere like that for a little while. They are economists who don't like economic models. And that is exactly the sort of economist I want to be.

Macroeconomics is also really lame. 90% of it is just trivial algebra, and the other 10% is just broad generalisations and assumptions needed to make the algebra simpler. But it's all good stuff to learn. At least I'm finding out all the stuff I'm not missing.

On the other hand econometrics is ultra cool. We're doing all this trippy matrix stuff, which I barely understand at all, but really enjoy. And not just because we have a cool lecturer who speaks in this laid-back, exaggerated Jamaican accent. What a champ.