Exam Days

This post was republished at Sydney Uni blogs.

Having two exams 18hs apart is hardly optimal. As every Uni student knows, the best exam schedule is about 5-6 days between your exams. That allows you to cool do for the rest of your day, get back into balance, and still have a reasonable amount of time to revise everything for the next exam, watch lecture recordings, and read up on texts you missed or topics you still don’t grasp very well.

Before my macro exam on Tuesday I had the same feelings of...

“OMG I CAN’T DO THIS” familiar to most of us. Despite the fact that I knew all the topics, had memorized all the equations in the very likely case the exam was gonna ask us to derive and use them. I knew the theories inside-out (at least to the extent these simplified versions are true representations of the actual theories), and I had it all covered. Still, 2 hours before the exam I was freaking out… So I made the very mature thing to have lunch in the sun, accepting that whatever happens inside this marvellous exam venue of mine was now beyond my control; and instead spend my time calming down. 

When it ended at 4 pm, not even the prospect of only 18h ‘til the Business Cycle & Asset Markets exam on Wednesday morning could ruin my mood. I never feel as anxious as right before an exam, or as relieved and calm after. Add dizziness and head spinning to that list. 

One hour’s worth of rest, eat a little something while embracing the wonderful Sydney sunshine, then back to revising the shit out of the next one. Good thing I spent the last few weeks preparing for these two horrible days and I had more than enough notes and articles to keep myself occupied. 

Million-dollar question is, however, if I did well enough. Sometimes it’s easy to tell (like yesterday’s Macro) and sometimes you’re really not sure (like today’s Business Cycle unit). I definitely failed the first essay question by not properly calculate the value of an asset using C-CAPM. I have hated that model for months, and the basic understanding I had sure didn’t help today. I’m pretty sure I did fine on the rest of the exam, so perhaps it’s enough to compensate.

This very suitable grey Sydney-morning is a metaphor for my inside right now. Good thing Sydney Uni Counselling and Psychological Services give people free biscuits. Yey. 

A few moments of calming down, before preparations for the penultimate exam of the semester begins: the heterodox Cyclical Fluctuations unit. So we go from unreasonable mainstream assumptions about actors and equilibriums and perfect informations, to heterodox post-keynesians (Minsky & Kalecki for now) and their unreasonable assumptions of aggregate relationships. 

I'm in for a treat!