Done exams forever!

I wrote my last exam yesterday. I don't think it went particularly well, but I only needed about a 40% to pass the class, and that would be fine by me. I have spent most of the last two weeks in the library studying and hanging out, but I am still dissapointed with my performance on these exams.

The first exam was policy. I think it went ok, especially because he gave us the questions before hand. My strategy was to research and write out the enire papers so that when I got into the exam room, I would be able to write everything out clearly without having to spend too much time thinking about it.

My second exam was Macro. I had not been keeping up with the work for most of the semester so I had a lot of catching up to do. To this end, I spent about three days going through the 69 page exam review problem set given to us and a further two days on six years of past exams. Of course I was very surprised when I got into the exam room to find that nearly everything I had studied was not being tested and instead he was looking for other problems for which I had not prepared. Ultimately, the mistake was mine, but it gave me a very bad feeling.

Afterwards, I was unable to bring myself to put in the kind of effort required to get a good mark in Financial Derivatives, knowing that my overall grades this semester would not be good regardless. When the exam did come, it was more of a relief that I knew I could get more than 50% and pass the course than a dissapointment that I could not get more than 80% and get an A.

Unfortunately, I am still not done with this semester. I still have a term paper that I must do for my panel data class. So far, I have started on it, but I still must write at least another seven pages and make several tables. At least I have pretty much all of the results I need from the regressions I ran yesterday and at the beginning of the month for my presentation.

As the end of the progam nears, most of my classmates are finding jobs or PhD programs. It seems that the Toronto crew will be slightly bigger than the Ottawa one, and probably contain more of my friends aswell. Thankfully, there are some good people going to Ottawa with me and I have secured at least one roommate for next year. In this way, going to Ottawa will be much easier than coming to Queen's was because I will already have a network of friends established, and of course Ashley will be there to help me do my networking in the government.

I am going to Vancouver on Saturday, by which time I will hopefully be done my term paper. I only have ten days there and so many people to see... It will also be my first time "visiting" Vancouver since I moved there almost eight years ago. From now on, Vancouver is no longer my home, and perhaps not even my home town. I have not decided yet how I will define myself when I move to Ottawa. Will I be from Ottawa, even though I have no networks or local knowledge there? Or will I be from Vancouver, even though I really only lived there for six years? My guess is that if I stay there longer, my definition will gradually change... Let's hope it does not.

Maybe I should do a better job of chorinicaling my life。。。

It is currently Passover. For the seder, I got myself invited to Josh's house. Josh is my classmate and his father, Dr Lewis, is a professor in the department, who I happended to TA for last semester. Dr Lewis lead the seder and it was all very similar to how we do it at home. One big difference I noticed was that once we started eating, the conversation mostly focused around sports. I tried to keep up, using my now dated baseball knowledge from when the Jays were winning, but I was clearly out of my depth. I guess I should pay more attention to sports, if only to be comfortable in a wider range of social situations. After the seder was over, we moved to the living room to watch the final game of the NCAA championship, which was pretty good.

On tuesday the derivatives professor invited the class out to the grad club for drinks. He is Chinese so I used the opportunity to try to impress him with my Chinese skills. Of course he was surprised but I don't know if it will make much difference in the end. Although I am happy to have been exposed to this stuff, knowing what I know now, I can't imagnine ever wanting to work as a "quant" in the financial industry. Talking with the prof was really fun. He is a smart guy, I would love to drink bai jiu with him some day.

Wednesday was the panel data presentation. I had prepared my slides on an open office clone of power point so when I tried to get them to work on the Microsoft real thing there were some problems. First, they did not work at all. Then I went back to the office to put the presentation on to a memory key, only to realise that the office computers do not read memory keys. Without other options, I emailed the presentation again and returned to the computer lab. This time, about half of the presentation worked, and after playing with it for a while, Casey got the whole thing to work. I think my presentation was somewhat weak on methodology, and maybe I could have included more slides on the lit review, but I was happy that I had some (preliminary) results to show.

Thursday was the last day of class and it was a big day. After macro, we all went to the grad club for drinks with profs. There, I got to talk to Casey, the panel data prof for a while about cartoons and other non-econ related stuff. After the grad club, I went to the debate closing of the house. Closing of the house is a whole event over several hours where the debate club elite honour eachother with the making of speeches and giving of awards. At times, it was moving, but at times I felt a bit bored. One thing it made me realise was that although I liked many of these people, because I did not go to any tournaments, I was not particularly close with many debators. In the end though, I had a fun year of debating, even though I did not go to any tournaments.

After the debate love-in, I went back to the office to meet up with Sajad and company to go to the Ale house. There, I found out that Dave and Weiwei, and Leo and Thang were both couples. As the program draws to a close, the potential negative consequences diminish hugely. Dating within the program is no longer a big risk, but an increasingly attractive option for many. I had fun driking there, but it was not a particularly noteworthy night.

最近我都没有很努力的学习. 因为我知道已经有工作所以我不够怕考试成绩不好. 今后我最少要读书和运动. 要花少一点的时间在网络上.

我很开心有机会去温哥华. 我想我的家人朋友们和那边的风景. 这里没有好走路的地方而且天气还过不了零度. 我才Ottawa也没有温哥华哪么好。还好我找的是政府的工作，还会有很多机会放假去旅游。