Caveat Archos

This afternoon I logged on to the AIER fellows blog to see if anyone had posted anything new for me to comment on (I’m much better at commenting than coming up with my own topic of the day) and I realized, Oh no!, there is a topic with my name in it!  Once again Mike Rizzo has been talking about me and I have to clean up afterwards!  (Haha, just kidding Mike!)   Yes, I did pass both of my comps, and yes, I will tell you a little bit about how I did it. 

I wish that I could be one of these people that claims they are so devoted to their studies that they spent hours upon hours in the library sipping coffee and reading econ texts for an entire year, but alas, my story is not so dramatic (and I don’t like coffee).

We will start when I first got to graduate school.  No wait, let’s start with my first summer at AIER (right before grad school).  First of all I was very excited that I got in but I had no idea what to expect!  It was great though, I learned a lot of things that became very useful in graduate school (truth be told, I had never heard of IS-LM analysis until Dr. Wood brought it up in a lunch conversation.)  But I think one key to graduate school, which started right there in Great Barrington, is to go out and look things up for yourself.  If you haven’t heard of IS-LM, go look it up, learn the basics and you can go on from there.   If you have a question, see if you can’t figure it out on your own before you go asking a professor.  I always find that if I am at a loss with something, it does me more good to try and figure it out on my own first, and then go to ask for help.  I think I remember more that way.

Moving on to grad school, of course all of the regular advice applies, go to class, do your homework (don’t just copy homework from 2nd years!), and study.  Be careful though, in the words of Mr. Rizzo himself, it is possible to study too much.   The most important tool for surviving that first year and the comps though, is your classmates.  There is bound to be someone with complementary knowledge to your own.  Let’s face it, we don’t all understand everything.  If you find someone to study with that understands the things you don’t, and you can help them out with things that they don’t understand (so as not to have a free-rider problem) then life is a lot easier!  I sometimes found that study sessions like this are far more helpful than class because your peer is more likely to explain it in a way that you can understand instead of in Cobb-Douglas production functions.

 As far as the actual comps go, they are all different.  If you know what you did in class and you are familiar with your basic micro- and macro- principles, then it shouldn’t be a problem.  If you did it in class, know it, if it is a basic principle from undergrad, know it, and by know it I mean be able to explain everything about it not just write down a model.  Writing down a model is one thing, understanding a model is something totally different, when you understand your models, you are in business!  My comps were in mid-August, in June I studied principles material for maybe 3 days a week no more than a few hours a day, then in July I studied everything I learned in grad school every weekday for about 3 or 4 hours.  August was crunch time and I got back with the study partner mentioned above and we worked on problems and old comps from about 10:00 - 5:00 for the 3 days before each test.   

In short, there is how I did it. I hope that this helps, I tried to think of everything that I did along the way.  If this didn’t help and you have any specific questions just ask me!  Also, remember to have a life outside of econ or you will go crazy!  I play flag football for the econ dept. to keep me sane!