All-Nighter at Club Fed

Since I like to be masochistic, I decided to take a class this quarter on top of working full-time. Well, that wasn't exactly the reason, but I figured I should dip my toes back into coursework to strengthen my transcript for grad school apps. More importantly, after being out of the classroom for 6 months, I need to reassess whether I want to go back for a few more years of fretting about exams, or just stay in the "real" world. Luckily, the Fed offers tuition reimbursement for "related" classes that improve human capital, which loosely covers all kinds of business, economics and math classes. Have I mentioned lately how much my job rocks?

The first class I'd wanted to take was Intro to Stochastic Processes, but Prof Lalley pretty much told me it was geared toward PhD students and that I should take something else. So, I settled on an "Introduction to Probability Models" class at the U of C (University of Chicago, in local parlance), which looked like it'd be manageable. It also covers stochastic processes, but with a less theoretical treatment and more emphasis on applications. And as we all know, applications = easy (relatively). Finally, in my smartest move yet, I was able to convince Katherine to take the class with me, so that I wouldn't be studying and doing problem sets entirely on my own.

The class is cross-listed as a graduate course, so it's filled with masters statistics students and senior math majors. To be honest, I'm more afraid of the senior math majors, many of whom have serious bowl cuts going on. When I first walked into the class, the room was filled with Asians. Oh wait, there were two white people, and they looked Russian. By the end of week one, we were 3 chapters and 200 pages into the book. The problem sets are due on Thursdays, and I spent the weekend reading the book, and did a first pass of the problem set on Mon night. At this point, I started to worry, and told Katherine that we had to work on this problem set Tues night. We stayed at the Fed until 11 pm, and at that point we'd only covered 3 out of the 7 problems...and the questions only get harder as you go on.

Wed night was even better--we spent the entire night at the Fed. That's right, we went to work at 9 in the morning, stayed up all night doing the first problem set of the quarter, went to class the next morning, and then came back for another 8 hours of "real" work. And because it was the week before an FOMC meeting, we were swamped with work. It wasn't pretty.

On the other hand, I've never been more comfortable with probability in my life. We were in an office with a whiteboard wall, which was covered with crazy scribblings and mathematical notation by the end. I felt really happy with our progress. Between the two of us, we were coming up with all sorts of re-indexing methods, recognizing obscure probability distributions, and transforming ugly algebraic messes into compact sums like no other. There's no way I would've been able to come up with all that on my own. And it was really satisfying to know that I could still think and analyze on a higher-order level.

As much fun as that was, I'm hoping that subsequent problem sets lighten up a bit, because I can't afford to pull an all-nighter every week. Back in my undergrad days, I could easily turn in projects and then sleep for the rest of the day, but that's not an option any more now that I have a job. Erg.