School Officially Begins!

Today was the first day of class! Our Introduction to Macroeconomics course began at 9 AM so I woke up to my alarm clock at 7 AM. I slept like a baby last night, and it was fairly easy to wake up because of my excitement our first day of school. There was an abundance of options for breakfast including pancakes, eggs, tater tots, fruit, and muffins. I found myself trying the pancakes and eggs, which were both tasty, and grabbing an apple on the go. I wanted to be early to class and found myself in front of the classroom with twenty minutes to spare. Erin and Andrew had arrived before me, and my other classmates were trickling in. I found out that Emily, the girl sitting next to me, actually resided on the same floor of the same house as me. She is the only person in the class that lives in Marcy Hall. It’s nice to know someone in your class lives just down the hall from you.

Our teacher is Nicholas Coleman, a graduate student in the Ph. D program for economics. We also have a Teaching Assistant, John McNeil, who is also in the process of earning a Ph. D in economics. Mr. Coleman is very welcoming to us and has a great sense of humor. He uses PowerPoint presentations for a visual aid and emails them to us to print out. Today he went over the syllabus and explained the outline of the class. The textbook we are using is Macroeconomics by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Mr. Coleman also suggested fun economics-related books for us to read if we liked. I plan on checking out On the Wealth of Nations and Eat the Rich, both by P.J. O’Rourke.

In the beginning of class, we each introduced ourselves and shared why we took this class. My reason was because I planned to major in economics in college. Many of my classmates are international students, with three European boys, two Koreans, two Colombians, and a handful of Chinese students. I look forward to hearing their different perspectives on American and global economics.

During the course of our three-week class, we will be working in groups on group project presentations. Our assignment today was to brainstorm ideas that we’d like to explore for our project, as well as read about graphs in chapter 2 of our textbook. Today’s lesson covered the first principles of macroeconomics, including opportunity costs, scarce resources, trade-offs, and incentives.

After class, Erinn and I went to explore Brown. I have to say, Brown is very beautiful and larger than I thought. There are a lot of trees and green grass areas, perfect spots for people studying outside.

We also went to wash our clothes because our bags of dirty clothes were starting to fill up. Today is the first day I did my own laundry. Thank goodness I had Erinn to help me because we faced obstacles with the machines not working. But in the end, I had nice, clean clothes to wear and this was a great learning experience. I take pride in having done my own laundry.

We thought there would be a yoga class today, but apparently it’s tomorrow. Instead, the RAs invited many students to gather on the grass in front of my house and played “speed friending”, a friends’ version of speed dating. After speed friending, our large group of maybe sixty gathered in a circle and played train wreck and another interesting game that the RAs introduced. Everyone was laughing and having fun meeting new people.I went back to my room early to start blogging and reading the homework, but I spent time video chatting with my family and later talking to Emily. We branched off to so many different subjects that I lost track of time and jumped to check in with my RA. I was on time at 11:15 PM. Our homework assignment isn’t long, but I want to finish so I can sleep earlier tonight. I look forward to tomorrow!