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Wow, it's been forever since I've been on this board. All of that damn first year work, /sigh. Anyway, I think my semester was a little different than many other people's since Harvard is comparatively pretty lax on what courses you do and don't have to take.
First semester is ending on Monday...
Micro:
Ed Glaeser taught our first half of micro. He's a large and scary man who talks very fast and yells derivatives at you. I wasn't a giant fan of the style of his class, but I somehow managed to beat the average on the midterm. The second half of micro was game theory taught by Drew Fudenberg which was amazing! We covered the basic stuff including up to sequential equilibrium in non-Bayesian games and touched upon some Bayesian material up to PBE. We just had the exam on Wednesday and I think 8 hours per day for a week or so definitely helped me prepare.
Macro:
Macro was also split into 2 parts. David Laibson taught dynamic programming in discrete and continuous time with some applications. We learned all the usual basic stuff about Bellman equations, Ito processes, etc... We even did some behavioral stuff when he showed us how to apply dynamic programming to non-stationary problems (ie hyperbolic discounting). That was fun. The second half was taught by Robert Barro and it was on growth models and the equity premium. I didn't really pay too much attention during this part of the class, which is going to come back and bite me on the final. Oh well.
Market Design:
I skipped the recommended stats course for entering first years and instead took Market Design, which is a 2nd year course, with Al Roth and Peter Coles. The course itself was very laid back and touched upon a lot of different topics. We talked about centralized matching, auctions, school choice, kidney exchange, markets for IP addresses and the design of carbon markets. I learned a lot about the field and I'm definitely making it one of my minor fields (if not a major one) next year. There were no psets or exams, just an assignment to write a 15-20 page paper by the end of the course.
Psychology and Economics:
I decided to add a 4th class for the first semester, so I took psych/ec with Sendhil Muillainathan. It was the first time he was running the course so it felt disorganized at times. We spent the first half of the course going over some behavioral decision models (beta-delta, categorization, law of small numbers, overconfidence, disjunction fallacy, etc...) and the second half on behavioral public policy. The public policy part of the course made me realize that I'm really a theorist/experimentalist at heart, but I did enjoy getting some really fresh new perspectives on things. It is rare to take a class that brings you to the actual research frontier of a subject. Again, the grading was fairly laid back, we had 2 psets, 2 ref. reports and have to hand in a final paper by Jan. 15.
I can't believe the first semester is almost over. I hope other people are enjoying their semesters as much as I am.
Next semester:
Macro II, Micro II, Basic Metrics, and (1 of 3) Networks, Advanced Game Theory, Experimental Economics.
Can't wait!
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