Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Monster Macro and the Ginormous Gym

I woke up before my alarm today, which I'm pretty sure is a first on this trip, and I was in the shower by 7 AM, a whole 10 minutes before I even expected to wake up. Once again, I headed off to Vernon-Wooley for breakfast with friends from all across the country, and decided to try to stuff in as much food as I could, since I found myself hungry a while before lunch yesterday. I wasn't able to manage to eat nearly as much as I would've liked, but an apple, French toast, and a few potatoes later, we headed off to Macroeconomics.

We finished our discussion of production possibility frontiers with a hypothetical problem regarding two castaways, Tom and Hanks (a problem that instantly made me a fan of my teacher, anyone that references Castaway in a practice problem is okay in my book) and how much easier their lives would be with trade.

We covered a lot of interesting material within the production possibility frontier section, and I got to learn the difference between an absolute advantage in production and a comparative advantage.

The by far most interesting part of the lecture covered supply and demand, or at least the demand part (we'll cover supply tomorrow). While a lot of the section on demand and how it could change was fairly intuitive, I had no idea that there was a demand line that demand quantity shifted up or down on depending on the price. I was also surprised that outside factors could lead to a shift off the whole line, not just the motion of the point of actual demand along the line, which was all I had thought happened. I am so glad I'm taking this course because I feel that although a good percentage of this material is new, I haven't been overwhelmed yet, and because of that my interest in Economics has doubled, since there aren't too many opportunities to absorb all this knowledge and actually understand it as well.

After what felt like a 30-minute class, it was already time for lunch, where I was amazed to find fairly decent burgers. We had a quick meal at Vernon-Wooley, and then it was time for me to go to the amazing new gym Brown just recently opened (something my mom will be glad to hear, since the second thing she told me to do while back East behind learning about all these colleges was to "try to bulk up for baseball a little bit. You're scrawny." Always nice to have a supportive mom). The gym was incredible, as I'm finding almost everything related to Brown to be, with every type of machine you could possibly imagine, and then 20 more. Two hours and about 10 pounds of sweat later (give or take a few), everyone split up to get some homework done, even though the Macro homework is due Friday, which I mentioned pretty much every 5 minutes to everyone else's chagrin. When a good chunk of the homework was finished, we headed back to the gym, this time to go to the beautiful pool, with the hopes of diving off the high dive.

Unfortunately, after getting changed and excited to go in the pool, we learned we had to take a swim test. Everyone passed with ease, but it did take like 15-20 minutes just because we had a decent amount of people with us. Then, after we were finally ready to go off the high dive, we were told that no one would be allowed to, not even our creative friend who said he was on the dive team in hopes of getting to jump off the high dive. We ended up playing a not too competitive water basketball game with a water polo ball, and when we were done with that, we realized it was only 7, and we still had time to eat and relax for a few hours before check-in. I was amazed yesterday and today that I was able to learn so much and have so much free time as well, something I hope will continue in the future.

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