It's the economy
Dec. 3rd, 2014 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkFor the December meme, a question by ambyr: What are you studying, and why?
I study socioeconomics at the Vienna University for Business and Economics (bachelor.) In short, I wanted to understand how the world works.
I actually thought I'd study something related to natural sciences for quite a long time. I enjoyed maths and physics, biology was okay, and chemistry class was boring but that was the teacher's fault. I was fascinated with space especially. It was interesting, I was good at it, I was often told how important natural sciences are, and also how important it is to promote girls studying these subjects.
It was a bit of a surprise when I realized, a few years before finishing highschool, that while I'm interested in natural sciences, I'm not really fascinated by them. I liked reading about it and solving simple problems, but not going into detail. I want to see the results, not do the work.
Then I thought about studying history or literature, my two favorite subjects. But while I still find them very interesting, the university syllabi seemed much less so; I wasn't quite satisfied with that.
I still didn't know what I wanted to study half a year before I graduated, and I started to become a bit nervous about it.
At the same time I became more and more frustrated by newspapers. Either they never talked about the background of what happened, or when they did I often couldn't understand it. My father works in business law (his current specialty is money laundering) and I was extremely grateful that he could explain many things to me. Suddenly some things made sense! And it was extremely interesting to hear more about the background of events mentioned in newspapers.
I wanted to be able to do that, to understand that, to have that knowledge. Basically I wanted to know how the world works, this huge and strange system of "society" that humans created and that we all live in. I contemplated law and sociology for a short time, but what I found most interesting was economics. Economics seemed to be in the background of all things, especially politics. I didn't understand how it works at all, but I wanted to.
So I started studying economics, and in the beginning I enjoyed it a lot. We had some business classes, too, that was also interesting. (I think I was one of the few people who enjoyed the accounting classes, possibly because I'd watched a great Enron documentary shortly before.)
However, I soon became frustrated with the narrow focus of economics. Sure, you have your models and data, but you don't know where the data is coming from and the models have so many assumptions that are in many cases clearly not true that I couldn't understand how people were building on this shaky ground.
I switched my focus to socioeconomics after about a year and a half, which thankfully was very easily possible. I was much happier with that approach: we had some additional classes on methods of social sciences, some that were sociology-related, a few more about the history of economical thought and the politics of it.
The one thing I like less about the program is that it feels like I learned a little bit of many things, but not one subject really in depth. But on the other hand that's all there was time for and I like this way better than the alternative.
Do I understand how the world works? Of course not, but a bit more than before. It was discouraging to find out that the world's leading "experts" often can't agree on basic economic facts, so what chance do normal people have? At least now I feel less lost when reading newspaper articles on economical issues. (I wish I remembered more from my econometrics classes, that would be useful, I'll have to revisit that one day.)
Currently I only need to finish my bachelor thesis, then I'm done. Originally I planned to do the Social and Economic History Master at the University of Vienna afterwards, but currently I'm thinking I'll probably work for a year or so before that because I'm not sure how well I'd handle a full course schedule.
Huh, this got longer than I thought. Posting this a day earlier than originally intended because a) who cares, and b) tomorrow we watch Babylon 5 again! and it'll take me long enough to write about that.
ambyr: What are you studying, and why?I study socioeconomics at the Vienna University for Business and Economics (bachelor.) In short, I wanted to understand how the world works.
I actually thought I'd study something related to natural sciences for quite a long time. I enjoyed maths and physics, biology was okay, and chemistry class was boring but that was the teacher's fault. I was fascinated with space especially. It was interesting, I was good at it, I was often told how important natural sciences are, and also how important it is to promote girls studying these subjects.
It was a bit of a surprise when I realized, a few years before finishing highschool, that while I'm interested in natural sciences, I'm not really fascinated by them. I liked reading about it and solving simple problems, but not going into detail. I want to see the results, not do the work.
Then I thought about studying history or literature, my two favorite subjects. But while I still find them very interesting, the university syllabi seemed much less so; I wasn't quite satisfied with that.
I still didn't know what I wanted to study half a year before I graduated, and I started to become a bit nervous about it.
At the same time I became more and more frustrated by newspapers. Either they never talked about the background of what happened, or when they did I often couldn't understand it. My father works in business law (his current specialty is money laundering) and I was extremely grateful that he could explain many things to me. Suddenly some things made sense! And it was extremely interesting to hear more about the background of events mentioned in newspapers.
I wanted to be able to do that, to understand that, to have that knowledge. Basically I wanted to know how the world works, this huge and strange system of "society" that humans created and that we all live in. I contemplated law and sociology for a short time, but what I found most interesting was economics. Economics seemed to be in the background of all things, especially politics. I didn't understand how it works at all, but I wanted to.
So I started studying economics, and in the beginning I enjoyed it a lot. We had some business classes, too, that was also interesting. (I think I was one of the few people who enjoyed the accounting classes, possibly because I'd watched a great Enron documentary shortly before.)
However, I soon became frustrated with the narrow focus of economics. Sure, you have your models and data, but you don't know where the data is coming from and the models have so many assumptions that are in many cases clearly not true that I couldn't understand how people were building on this shaky ground.
I switched my focus to socioeconomics after about a year and a half, which thankfully was very easily possible. I was much happier with that approach: we had some additional classes on methods of social sciences, some that were sociology-related, a few more about the history of economical thought and the politics of it.
The one thing I like less about the program is that it feels like I learned a little bit of many things, but not one subject really in depth. But on the other hand that's all there was time for and I like this way better than the alternative.
Do I understand how the world works? Of course not, but a bit more than before. It was discouraging to find out that the world's leading "experts" often can't agree on basic economic facts, so what chance do normal people have? At least now I feel less lost when reading newspaper articles on economical issues. (I wish I remembered more from my econometrics classes, that would be useful, I'll have to revisit that one day.)
Currently I only need to finish my bachelor thesis, then I'm done. Originally I planned to do the Social and Economic History Master at the University of Vienna afterwards, but currently I'm thinking I'll probably work for a year or so before that because I'm not sure how well I'd handle a full course schedule.
Huh, this got longer than I thought. Posting this a day earlier than originally intended because a) who cares, and b) tomorrow we watch Babylon 5 again! and it'll take me long enough to write about that.
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Date: 2014-12-03 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 11:17 pm (UTC)Most of my classes were in German, but in the second half of the program a lot of the reading was in English. (Despite the fact that English is technically not a required language, it's usually assumed that you know it.)
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Date: 2014-12-03 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-03 10:43 pm (UTC)Da hast du den Grund, weshalb du erst mal einen Allgemeineinstieg hinter dir hast. Für Spezialisierungen ist in der Regel der zweite Studienabschnitt bzw. inzwischen das Master-Studium zuständig, der Doktor dann, wenn man noch weiter in die Materie rein will. (Und dann besteht natürlich auch während des Bachelor-Studiums ja immer schon die Möglichkeit, sich nebenbei Zusatzliteratur zu gönnen. Nicht, dass ich das in meinem Studium sonderlich viel gemacht hätte, aber joa. >_>;;)
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Date: 2014-12-03 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 04:18 pm (UTC)I get the feeling this is a pretty common problem with beginning economics, yeah! I had to take Intro to Macro and Intro to Micro in college and hated them--so many assumptions! So many obvious flaws! But I have a couple friends who are finishing up their doctorates in the field, and they assure me it does get better once you're at the point where you're generating your own datasets from primary source material.
What's your thesis researching?
no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 11:12 pm (UTC)In short, women in the Russian labor market. It's annoying me right now.