It Has Been a While

Well the last few weeks, particularly the last week, I have been quite busy with actually school related work. Unfortunately, even though I have been busy I have not found much enjoyment through leaning any of these subjects. I think I will try and start reading Stochastic Calculus for Finance 1 again. I had stopped a while back because I found Abstract Algebra to be somewhat fascinating at the time but we all know how fads are; here one moment and gone the next. Needless to say French is still dominating my "free" time. It is quite sad how I spend more time doing work for this class than anything else. If only it were not a five credit class (the majority of my other classes are only three) I would be so much happier. You never feel satisfied when you have to decided weather to look at material for one of your major related classes or for the one class that is going to have the biggest impact on you GPA, and eighty-five percent of the time you have to side with your GPA. Thank goodness this insanity will end with the conclusion of this semester.

A few days ago we had a test in Abstract. The class is structured so that each test has two parts; a take home and in class portion. For the take home we are split into teams and have about a week to solve all of the problems. We are allowed to use any resource we can find, other than asking for help from other people outside of our teams and instructor. Thank goodness the take home part of the exam was not all that difficult, although it did make you stop and actually think about a few question. When it came time to do the in class I almost cried, I quite certain that there is no way I performed that well. The class after the exam one student was talking about how a guy with a gun was arrested in his apartment complex. To this the professor said "See compared to that the in class exam was not all the bad right?" The student's response was something along the lines of "I didn't cry after they arrested that guy, I can't however say the same thing about that exam." Well it's not going to do me much good dwelling on it now, I will just have to be more prepared for the next exams.

Managerial Economics is quite possibly the second dullest class I have taken so far (the first would most certainly have to Financial Accounting). Sure the material is interesting at times but he really doesn't have the pleasure to go into a great deal of depth on those topics. I find that he spends a lot of time explaining the basic pre-calculus math he uses in his example problems. At this point it is starting to be more of a nuisance than a point of amusement, honestly this is an intermediate level class, you should know how to do high school algebra. This paired with the fact that calculus 1 is a prerequisite for this class really bothers me. I wonder how much different, and possibly better, this class would be if he assumed you could follow the math so that he could focus on the logic behind the process. Similar to every other science and math class which assumes you understand the basic concepts from the prerequisite classes. Regardless, the majority of the assignments are not difficult if you watch the lectures and actually pay attention. We had our first test a few days ago, I didn't do as well as I had hoped but I am not that worried. I did extremely well on the free response part of the exam, it was the multiple choice part that lowered the score. This could just be me speaking as a math major but personally I prefer free response test to multiple choice test any day. With multiple choice it is either right or wrong and you have no chance to defend your position.

Not much to say about Advanced Calculus 2. We just finished the chapter on integration and I believe we are nearing the end of the chapter on uniform convergence (sequences and series of functions). Yesterday we were shown what I consider to be the most amazing thing ever, a function that is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere.

Showing that this is continuous for all real is pretty easy, I suppose the same could be said about showing that it is not differentiable, even thought he proof is kind of long.

After I was done with classes yesterday I went to talk to one of my professors about graduate school. During this time we discovered that there was going to be a seminar on Financial Mathematics given by another professor. I ended up attending the seminar but really did not gain too much information. Really he just gave a brief history of the topic, named some schools that offered programs in it, and concluded by listing some books for recommended reading.

Well in other nonacademic life things really haven't changed. On Tuesday I went to the gym with some friends. I didn't really do much other than cardiovascular stuff, not really a fan of weights for some reason. Walking back I was talking to a friend (the girl who I mentioned during a previous post), it was kind of interesting even though we really didn't say anything out of the ordinary. I guess it's that I really just like being around her, yes I still like her but thats a story for a different post. Anyway out of nowhere she just kind of grabs me which kind of took me by surprise. Right now I am just hoping that those few seconds will not be the best ones for this week, but the way things are going they seem to have a pretty decent chance. Finally, this week just killed my television watching. For some reason my room no longer gets Fox News, CNN, or CNN Headline News. Even though I'm not a big Fox News fan it is still better than nothing, how am I going to get my news now? Well guess I'll have to read some news papers and use the internet.