ALTERNANERD' = NERD

out of my entire college career so far, never have i experienced this high a concentration of studying within the past 48 hours. regretfully, i realize i should have practiced this kind of work ethic before being nearly 1/3 of the way to the finish line.

just the mere thought of two finals in one day initially overwhelmed me, and even discouraged me. self-deliberation of what it takes to get into graduate school served as my motivation, and the result was maaaaaaaad occupation at the library. (and not even falling asleep for a second, which is sadly a new record for me). the strangest outcome of doing so much of this studying was the change in opinion of my economic development class. originally i absolutely hated this class. mostly for the reason that we had to do a lab for a social science class and also because the textbook contained a frightening amount of regressions, data tables, and enough variables to represent every letter in the alphabet five times. seriously, who really enjoys taking raw data about a random country, dumping it into excel, rearranging it and then making regressions? when id go into lecture, all of the topics seemed fairly straightforward and logical. this provided a false sense of security, causing me to think that studying the powerpoint slides online was just enough. so wrong. EZbuckets right there.

then i got owned by the midterm.

this was a wakeup call for me to start taking the class seriously so that i could makeup for it on the final. it wasnt until class was officially over that i actually picked up the book. i forced myself to go to the library and read it...and found myself enjoying it. sure there was a ton of crap data going around, but after interpreting it and making my own conclusions, i gained this weird sense of satisfaction.

i think people truly enjoy the academia of college when they find themselves able to apply the stuff they learn. the last question on my final asked "considering all of the aspects of this course, which is the most critical to development?" the first sentence of my response sounded childish but worked, "you cant get something without putting something in." and then i realized while throwing all of my thoughts on paper how much we utilize investment in our everyday lives. sometimes we feel like we have all the time in the world, but that is not the case. time is a limited resource, and we have to properly invest it in order to reap the rewards. obviously the word itself feels so mechanical, but we use it in so many different ways that it blows my mind. we invest in leaving our computers on overnight to get free stuff. we invest in taking the time and energy to walk or drive out to hangout with friends and have a blast. we invest in toilet paper to keep our hands from being disgusting. gotta say, my econ classes have had almost the same effect as biology with garabedian on how i perceive the world.

thats right. you cant get something without putting something in. that can be garabedian also. think about it...