On a Friday morning when I normally don’t have class, I had to go to a Fed Challenge seminar from 8:30 AM until 3:00 PM and listen in on economists talk about the current state of the economy. The speakers on the state of the economy and on what caused the housing crisis were interesting, but that was the only good part of the day. The rest of it was just boring. I was cramped between two people, and it wasn’t even like there was a petite Asian girl sitting next to me that I could steal leg room from. On my left was my fellow teammate, who is taller than I am, and on my right was this fat guy who was encroaching on my territory – so the seating arrangement was unpleasant to say the least. Sitting there from nine to three made it unbearable. On top of that they didn’t even provide any food for lunch; for an institution that can mint money at will, you would have thought they could have printed a couple of hundreds and buy us sandwiches or something.
For those of you who don’t know what Fed Challenge is, we determine Federal Reserve monetary policy (or any sort of policy that the Fed could pull off) and analyze economic data to prove why our solution is the best. For those of you who don’t know what that means, that’s OK; I’m not sure I get what I’m supposed to be doing myself.
Out of 11 people that tried out for the team, seven of us made it, bringing the total number of people working on this up to nine, including the members from last year. Unfortunately, only 5 people actually present; the rest of us end up only making lots of economic graphs. It’s a risky gamble, but it’s one I’m willing to take – hopefully I’ll be one of the ones that’ll be able to actually present in the competition. After all, I don’t have much on my resume to show what I did last year (which is nothing), but I also find this stuff interesting. I think it would be good to understand how the economy actually works and complement that with what I learn at school.
I’m not paying fifty grand a year just to go to class. If I wanted to just go to school I could have gone to one of the UCs and saved me and my parents a LOT of money. No, the reason why I’m paying the money that I am is because of the people you meet, the clubs you go to, and the connections you make outside of class. Classes and GPAs aren’t that important. It’s a convenient benchmark for the type of talent firms and organizations want to attract, but it’s what’s behind that GPA that matter. I hope I’m taking the right step towards accomplishing that.
By the way, if there’s someone who wants me to elaborate on the state of the economy, I took notes if anyone’s interested in that stuff. But, that's not what this blog is for.
-Emoinacloset
