Courses, and A Discussion with Woody And Janet On a Bus in Kazakhstan

I have decided on a list of courses for next year, and I'm very excited. It couldn't have turned out better. In my program, one takes four "units", and a course that is a single unit will take the full year. Half-unit courses meet either only in the Michelmas (Fall) or Lent (Spring) terms. Oddly, preliminary year students (as I am) are only required to take three exams, but must take four credits, which means in January we are expected to drop one of our courses so as not to take an exam in it, but to continue attending it and doing the homework. Presumably you drop the one that you are doing the worst in and which is not a prerequisite for anything you want to take the next year.

I also have some time to decide which exact courses I will take. For example, EC319 ("Mathematical Economics") and EC411 ("Microeconomics for Graduate Students") apparently have a lot of material in common, and my advisor recommends taking one or the other. The former is more mathematically rigorous, but the latter is broader (and prepares one for the next graduate level course in Micro).

So, my schedule - tentatively - looks like this. (EC=Economics dept., ST=Statistics dept., and MA=Math dept.):

EC319 / EC411 - Mathematical Economics or Microeconomics
EC309 - Econometrics
ST202 - Probability, Distribution Theory and Inference (they feel my stats need bolstering)
MA401 - Computational Learning Theory (Michelmas term)
MA408 - Discrete Mathematics and Complexity (Lent term)

Allow me to appear to digress, and I'll tie it in at the end. In my last days in Kazakhstan, during our close of service conferece, one of the other volunteers asked me a question about physics, something like "what is the difference between light waves and sound waves", I don't remember exactly. And I talked their poor ears off for about an hour until their interest was too clearly waning for me to let myself continue.

At this time, I was trying to decide between LSE and other schools, and the enthusiasm that I had attacked this question with made me realize how much I really love math and it's kindred subjects. That discussion was one of several small epiphanies that made me decide that LSE, with its very mathematical (and flexible) master's program, was the best place for me. Looking at this schedule, I am excited about all the courses, but those last two make me feel like a little kid going to a toy store, and confirms to me that coming here was the right decision.