Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Oral Examination in Industrial Organization

I had my first experience with being examined orally today. I was pretty nervous in the hour leading up to the thing, even though everyone was saying it was not a big deal. I sat down and the conversation went something like this:
Pakes: "tell me what you're interested in in IO"

Me: "does that mean you'll ask me questions about whatever I say I'm interested in? like, should i say the easiest thing?"

Pakes: "let me put it this way: if you can reason through a single thing that we covered in the entire class, then you'll get...the same grade. so let's talk about what you're interested in"

Me: "oh, well, in that case....i sort of liked the collusion stuff at the end of the class"
Also, when I told him i was an undergrad, his exact response was
"You're an undergrad?....far out."

1 comment:

Andy Hall said...

jonathan i suspect that that firefox link MAY be fake. it might have a virus! watch out.

collusion. that is so freshman year econ. please. i can do cournot equilibria in my sleep. not to mention bertrand. i can even do stackelberg and illustrate situations of first-mover advantage. i should be teaching this class.