During the school year I didn't keep up the blog; the last update is from spring break, when I spent a week at home with some extra time on my hands. Well, I'm back at my parents' place for a visit this summer, so in the spirit of tradition, time for another update.
Since my last post--about a winter break trip to Europe--I finished my graduate degree in San Diego, took a West Coast road trip with buddies from the masters program, and landed a one year position in Tokyo. More on those to come.
But before I get into summer trips and future plans, here's a quick recap of winter and spring quarter at UCSD:
In the second year of my grad program I had much more flexibility with classes, since I got most of my required courses out of the way first year. In the winter, I decided to take a class on the Financial Crisis (2008-09), which was taught by the guy chosen to be Chief Investment Officer of TARP back in fall of 08. If you are a bit hazy on the crisis, TARP, or the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was a $700 billion program to buy toxic assets and equity of troubled firms to prop up the financial system when the shit hit the fan in Sept/Oct 2008 and the entire economy seemed on the brink of collapse. Although the professor kept some of the juicy details to himself, this lectures were still fascinating.
Winter quarter I also took a class from a retired Admiral in the U.S. Navy on National Security. Although I enjoyed the economics courses, it was refreshing to take something closer to what I thought I'd signed up for in an International Affairs degree. I enjoyed lectures, and the class itself was easy on the workload, so I signed up for another of the professor's courses in the spring (Strategic Studies). He also liked to meet at the campus bar across from our department for drinks after our evening class, and would sometimes chip in for the first 80 bucks.
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| At one of the Admiral's happy hours |
Aside from those two classes, I enrolled in Fiscal and Monetary Policy, plus Spanish as part of my language requirement--even though I took German in college, I needed proficiency in a Pacific language (from E/SE Asia or Latin America). I skipped the fall course and jumped in from winter, since I had some background from my study abroad in Ecuador. But that experience was a full decade ago, so at times I felt like a fish out of water, especially with the grammar. And we certainly focused on the grammar. Over both winter and spring I couldn't get away from the subjunctive. The professor was nice, but let's just say I would have structured the class differently.
I also was on the payroll with my International Law professor starting winter quarter. Last spring, after I took the course, she asked me if I wanted to be TA for spring of 2019. This gig wasn't a traditional TA position. Part of her International Law course is a month-long simulation, where students are divided into countries and each given a role of a real life figure. One student plays the head of state, and the other three are key figures in government, or another area such as business. For example, the American team consisted of Trump, Gina Haspel (CIA), Robert Mercer (Renaissance Technologies), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). The topic this spring was cyber-security, and countries were tasked with coming up with an agreement via the UN Group of Governmental Experts, which had previously failed to release a consensus report. Students could also make side deals, form alternate coalitions, and basically do whatever they thought was in the best interest of their character.
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Cyber-security and the UN GGE has popped up a lot in the news, although I knew
almost nothing about it prior to my research planning the simulation. |
As TA, I was in charge of designing the simulation, including picking the topic, the rules, and the characters (along with a page description of each and their position on the issue as a road-map for students). Fortunately, the professor and I met several times in the fall to brainstorm and select a topic, and then I had winter quarter to hash out the details. I was paid for 10 hours a week of work, and then when spring rolled around, I was the main simulation organizer. I also had another second year assistant, who was a great right hand man; with 51 students, I don't think I could have done it all myself! Needless to say, spring quarter was hectic (at least for the 4-5 weeks of the sim).
Anticipating the bottleneck, I strategized to make my spring quarter schedule fairly easy. The Admiral's class was again a light load, and I opted for a manageable International Trade course. I was already locked in for the other two: I had to continue with Spanish to finish out my language requirement, and fulfilled my Latin American specialization with Economic Policies in Latin America. All in all, not a bad line-up for my last quarter. Once the simulation was over, the last couple weeks were relaxing...well, relatively speaking. I was still on the hook to grade the students' final essays, but by that point my grades were mostly locked in and I had a job lined up (I'll save that for a separate post).
My two finals were on Wednesday and Thursday during the second week of June, and my parents came down around the same time for graduation. I was amazed that we had finals so close to graduation day, which was Sunday. My Spanish teacher had less than 72 hours to get the grades in! Well, I later learned that they technically had until the following Monday, and one of my professors actually didn't submit grades until nearly a week after the ceremony. What would they have done if I failed? Fortunately for me, I didn't have any issues.
Some photos from graduation:
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| With Lucas (left) and our career counselor |
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My best friend from high school, Andrew,
came down for the ceremony (he lives in LA) |
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Team Carol with Chan's two kids, who lived
in San Diego for his two years of school |
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