Latest school update

Behavioral economics is hard! I'm spending the bulk of my studying time working on stuff from this class. We have read 17+ peer-reviewed papers so far and most of them are 30-50 pages long. We usually read 2-3 a week and then post our reactions to them online. We've only covered a very small part of the different areas of this subject. I'm on a team with two other classmates and we have been working on our empirical paper (this will basically be our final) and the experimental setup. I've had to learn how to use Amazon's Mechanical Turk and how to make surveys at another site, Qualtrics. This is in order to collect data from actual anonymous human subjects. What a headache that was. The actual process was fairly simple, but learning what the process is has been a nightmare. I finally cracked it this afternoon. Yay for me! Now if I can just get my team mates to do a little more work (I've done the majority of what we have done so far) then I will be much happier. We have a good start, but we have a lot of work left to do. Even though this class has been very hard (probably the hardest class I've had so far) and very stressful, I have learned a LOT. It's a fascinating field that helps make more sense of economics and shows that standard economic models that assume our complete rationality are woefully lacking in explanatory power in many ways.

My two other classes are going reasonably well. I got an A- on my Energy Econ midterm. I have a lot of confidence for the final in this class. I did pretty well on my Green Power midterm, but that was only because so many people did a horrible job on the second part (including me. Apparently I'm not the only one who had a hard time understanding what he wanted) that the professor let us take it home over the weekend and redo that part. My final is a 5-page paper (double-spaced!!!) that should be relatively easy (I hope!) to write. I have a rough outline so far and have two+ weeks to finish it. Hopefully I won't procrastinate too much.

Yesterday morning I registered for classes for the coming spring term. It's frustrating that a lot of the classes I want to take are either at the same time or overlap so I can't take them. I was thinking about a weird schedule so I didn't have to take a teacher who I don't care that much for, but I decided it wouldn't have been worth it. I went ahead and signed up for that same professor. I'm sure I'll learn plenty, but I just don't care much for his teaching style. He's kind of full of himself. My new schedule is listed below.

• HST339U - Environment & History - Monday 5:30-9:10pm - This is one of my sustainability cluster classes. I like history. I like the environment. I should like this class (?). My first single day class at PSU and my first 'night' class at PSU. Commuting may not be easier, but the MAX should be less crowed and I shouldn't have to walk as far from my car. We'll see. I need 4 books for this class, which should cost less than $80 total.
• EC332 - Economics of Environmental Issues - Tuesday and Thursday 10-11:50am - This is the above mentioned professor. I don't know what the text(s) will be for this class. Most likely it will be another book he wrote and we will have to buy the latest edition of it. I'm a bit turned off by that. 
• EC345U - Marxist Political Economy - Tuesday and Thursday 12-1:50pm - This class should be interesting. I've heard a lot of different opinions about Marx. I've heard this class is very balanced and very informative. More of a history and critique than most economics classes. I heard the teacher is pretty good too. We'll see. 3 books for this class (abt. $50 total)

These classes are all 300-level rather than all 400-level like I'm taking now. Apparently that doesn't always mean what you might think, but I'm hoping for a slightly more relaxed pace for this term. The cost of textbooks will be more than this term, but still not too bad. Probably because none of them is an actual 'textbook'.

I spent a lot of time in the last couple of weeks agonizing over whether or not to do graduate studies. I'm pretty sure now that I'm not going to do that yet. First, I don't want to have to take all the advanced math classes. Second, I really don't want an additional $25-40,000 in debt when I graduate. Third, I want to get back to work. Fourth, I don't know how well I will handle the much greater workload that graduate students seem to have. My age is showing. Anywho, these all seem to point to no graduate studies for me. At least in the semi-near future. Unless I get struck by lightning and become a genius.