First Week Done!

The weather has been so beautiful in northern Virginia and it's such a picturesque setting here on the George Mason University campus.  I've gone to all of my classes at least once.  Almost all of them seemed very interesting except my Introduction to Computing.  Hopefully that one will, at least, not be a lot of work to get an A.  My Money & Banking class is one that I've been looking forward to perhaps the most since I began my studies anew at Saint Paul College.  Much of the class will be spent looking at monetary economics, which has become my speciality, but also on the business of banking which I still have much to learn.  The first class was a crash course in monetary economics, and  I answered every  question that was directed at the class.  The second class was a crash course in the banking industry and I only answered one question.

My statistics class seems as though it will be quite demanding, if only because the homework is quite involved.  There is a complicated process to turning it in and complicated statistical methods.  The Intermediate Macroeconomics course is being taught by another graduate student, which seems typical of night courses.  Naturally the quality is less, but I do not think it will be nearly as poor as my Intermediate Microeconomics class, which was taught by a graduate student that seemed to be disinterested and didn't even  seem to have a strong grasp on the subject.  My professor, Mark Liu, is relying heavily on the basic Greg Mankiw Principles of Macroeconomics text.  He is excited about the subject and it is a very collegial class.  There are several students within  the class who are very good at the subject (read: probably better than me) and they participated in a very active fashion.  One of them who was probably the best, walked out after the break.  He seemed quite bored by the class, but every answer he gave was exactly correct.  He sounded like a spontaneous textbook.  I would say that this class has terrific potential for me.

One new feature for studets is a website called ratemyprofessor.com.  It allows students to rate their professors in several categories: "easiness," "helpfulness," "clarity," and "hotness."  The last category is described as "just for fun."  The values are 1 being poor and 5 being excellent.  There are obvious problems with this site, meaning that professors that teach difficult classes or whose classes are difficult to pass will likely receive more negative reviews by spurned students.  Naturally, the negative of that statement would also be true.  Still, this site has gained traction by the amount of reviews that it receives, and most numerical reviews are also accompanied by written reviews so the reader can understand the reasoning behind  the negative and positive reviews.  Here is how some of my professors have performed.