Frisbee the Friend Maker

My class is located in the Smith-Buonnano Hall which is a 45 second walk from the dining hall. The Macroeconomics professor is very young and muscular. His name is Professor K. Coleman, a grad student, and his Teaching Assistant is John McNeill, an under grad student. Our class started promptly at 9:00AM. Andrew, Kathleen, and I sat together in a row in the center of the heavily air-conditioned classroom. There are approximately thirty students in my class.

Macroeconomics is the study of the big picture of the economy: the ups and downs, inflations and deflations, depressions and revivals. Microeconomics is the study of individual economies and how they work. We started off the three-hour class with some basic definitions. Today, Professor Coleman explained some basic concepts of economics. He told us to enjoy the material that we were going to study in the next couple of weeks and not stress about homework or tests. This course is available so students can understand macroeconomics and what it represents.

Professor Coleman explained many of the course concepts with analogies to fruit, especially apples and strawberries. I know that it is only the first day, but I am not totally solid on distinguishing the differences between the types of individual choice situations (involving resources, opportunity costs, incentives and margin decisions). If I immerse myself in all this vocabulary and take advantage of a lot of practice questions, I’ll be able to get this down. Overall, I enjoy the class and the professor.

My homework tonight is to research movies that are heavily or partially based on economics. Some are “Dr. Strangelove”, “Inside Job”, “A Beautiful Mind”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, and “Freakonomics”. So far I have found “Bourne Identity”, “American Gangster”, “Blood Diamond”, and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. I also need to read through the Appendix of Chapter 2 in my textbook to review basic slope graphing (y=mx+b).

Favorite quote from my professor today: “If you want to be wrong, you can disagree.”

After my class, I took a nice two hour nap in my dorm before I took out my trusty Frisbee and headed over to the main green. I met two girls that are totally cool. Steph and Rachel are from New Jersey. Steph is taking a design class and Rachel is in BioTech with Frank and Erinn. Here's a picture of Steph's homework. It is made out of laser-cut wood pieces.

I explored the campus today my floor mate, Erin. Grace Yuen from our L’Espalier dinner e-mailed me the locations of some digital media classrooms. Erin and I found the Center of Information Technology. We checked out the building and went to the top floor to see the view.

Cohort #1 got together to go to a yoga class, but we found out that it is tomorrow. Rachel and I took some pictures in the yoga room while we were there.

Later, Rachel, Steph, and I tossed around a Nerf football until 11:00PM. Curfew is at 12:30PM. I checked in with Mikalei early and went to my room. After all my floor mates left my and Olivia’s room, we got to work on our laptops.

I love being surrounded by intellectuals here at Brown. Everyone is diverse, but they all are extremely intelligent and interesting. People talk differently here. They are confident and witty. The girls on my floor are all very sociable and good-humored. I am very fortunate to know all of them. I love Brown University. It gets better every day. This independence is so nice and so new. I could get used to this.

My bad joke of the day: “Tomorrow, do you want to go here or go Thayer?”

(Hahaha! Like Thayer Street? “There”? Get it?)