I haven’t thought about free culture and related issues in about eight months, since I started working toward my PhD in economics. Grad school doesn’t allow me much time to work on outside projects, and that’s a shame. I miss being surrounded by such good people, such technical people, having such interesting conversations, about such important and interesting topics. This past weekend showed me firsthand the massive opportunity costs that grad school entails. I really want to get back into coding or advocacy, but I keep running into that time constraint. What a damn shame.

I’m going to end with some advice. If you want to join a top-notch community, seek out those who identify with the free culture movement. You won’t find a more dedicated group of smart people with the tools and drive to make awesome things happen.

I posit that, for whatever reason, not liking a class and not doing well in a class are correlated. For students who are sufficiently intelligent, and thus not close to failing any one of their classes, this doesn’t matter. They can spend the most time on the classes they like most. Those are good times.

But if you are up against the failure constraint, you will tend to be spending less time on the classes you like and more time on the classes you need to make sure you pass. It is all the worse if the classes you are doing poorly at are also those you do not enjoy very much. (This is probably the case: see above). Those are not very good times.

Here’s hoping my constrained optimization problem has a feasible solution.

See, what they don’t tell you about serious graduate school programs is the extent to which you are expected to know everything without having been taught it. In undergrad, the professor would only test you on things you covered in class. In grad school, you are lucky if what the professor covers in class is vaguely useful. More than half of what I’ve learned so far has been outside the classroom. This trend will surely continue into the future.

There’s also the little caveat about expectations. Some classes grade homework assignments strictly and care more about answers than methods and effort; some classes don’t even bother to grade homeworks (though if you don’t do them you’re almost guaranteed to fail the exams). Some exams test whether you can regurgitate proofs seen in class, some test mechanical problem solving skills and intuition, and some want you to know damn near everything. Sometimes you may spend more than half of your allotted time on two questions that, you find out after the fact, were only actually worth 18% of the exam grade, and you didn’t get any partial credit on them besides, but that your last five minutes of scribbling on a seemingly unimportant question netted you the majority of your points (a question which, by the way, was worth almost half of the points on the exam). No, you shouldn’t expect all exam questions to be weighted equally, either.

I know how I’m studying for the next round of exams: memorizing proofs, practicing my mechanics, and trying to learn damn near everything. And I am not making any more assumptions about how many points each question is worth.

Here are a few things that may come up if you find yourself in a similar interview in the future:

• The integral of x * e^x is (x-1)*e^x. You need to use integration by parts (or “inverse chain rule” as I like to call it).
• Know how to prove that the derivative of x^2 is 2*x using first principles.
• Don’t ramble on about the behavioral critique of the Walrasian general equilibrium without really knowing what you’re talking about.
• You may get bonus points for knowing how to solve a Master Cube.

Also, I got to thank Alan Blinder for holding the door open for me. I think that puts me two steps away from Bill Clinton if you use really tenuous links to determine your Bacon number.

Addendum: Integration by parts is not the “inverse chain rule”, as I previously thought, but instead “inverse product rule”. It appears my math-fu could use some practice.