Today has been a day filled with guilty moments. First, I woke up feeling guilty about not having studied enough for my Macro exam. When I went in to see my advisor about summer proposals, I felt guilty for not taking more steps to form solid summer plans earlier. After reading my email, I felt guilty for not donating to MIT. So, after donating what amounts to little more than pocket change to this institution which had me trapped in concrete for 4 years, I started feeling guilty for not donating to my high school… which should somehow be just as deserving and in greater need, or so I thought.

Then, when I read my friend’s posts about her progress with chemotherapy, I felt guilty for studying random abstract (read “useless”) economic models when there were so many people in the world suffering from illness. Why, I asked myself, did I switch from Biology, a field that had such potential to improve human health and ease suffering, to Finance, which on a practical level seems to serve only to make rich people richer?

Ah. I smile as my existentialist crisis looms ahead…

I’ve got two exams this week. Micro first thing tomorrow, and Macro on Wednesday. What does that mean? I’ve actually been looking at my notes, and rediscovering some quotes that need to be shared.

On the Cournot model, which talks about quantity competition vs the Bertrand model, which talks about price competition:

Bertrand wrote a one-page review of Cournot’s work. Bertrand was one of those flippantly arrogant French mathematicians who just said, “Cournot’s an idiot! When I go to the market, I see prices!” Actually, Cournot was a genius, but he got depressed after Bertrand’s review and stopped doing economics.

That’s all for now. It’s back to the Centipede game for me!

(PS: I found a centipede in the basement of my apartment building. Wow! Those things are really fast!)