Award Possibilities

My week in Colorado went well. I almost got bumped off my flight out there on Sunday, which would have had me flying from Austin to Denver through Chicago the next day and missing most of a full day of class, but some poor fool was just late enough at the gate, and the airline worker was just sympathetic enough, for me to get that person's seat.

I have been at CSU enough now that I helped 3 or 4 different visitors on campus find the buildings they were looking for. This shows you how easy it is to get around in Fort Collins.

A woman from New Mexico introduced me and my roommate to a quite decent Mexican restaurant in town (Tam, you can imagine my excitement!). I ordered mixed chicken and beef fajitas (that was not a specific option on the menu) and my roommate was happy because it had never occurred to her to ask for them that way before. They were nice fajitas and helped in some small way assuage the culture shock I was experiencing being in a town that is approximately 103% Anglo.

It's actually been pretty interesting talking to so many people from those sparsely populated states in the West. When somebody mentioned that the Dakotas hadn't sent anyone to the program, I said that the 6 people in the department looked at each other and nobody wanted to go. One person from Idaho or Montana was wondering about the sample size he should use for his survey of the general population of the state and I said he shouldn't worry too much about it; he should just ask all 47 of them and hope that at least 30 are not currently in possession of automatic weapons and waiting for an excuse to kill an agent of the government with them. This really suggested to me that a mail survey would be a better administration mode than a face-to-face design.

A "Committee of Evil" was self-selected to come up with awards for our graduation in May. I have already been told by one member of the committee that a classmate is going to receive a "Most Ballsy Excuse for Not Doing Her Homework Correctly" award for her comment to the instructor: "I was doing a lot of drugs during the lecture on this stuff."

I can imagine three possibilities for awards I could have inspired this week based on feedback from my classmates:

"Most likely to strike fear in the hearts of random residents of the city of Fort Collins as she walks down the street" When the group I was with encountered another group of our classmates walking down the street one evening, I was so struck by how much this was like being in a movie with two rival gangs approaching each other that I yelled out to them in a loud voice "Are you ready to rumble?" They were not ready. People were giving me a hard time in the bar on the night before St Patrick's Day as other patrons were getting quite drunk watching basketball; I ordered a beer and my classmates were all mock alarmed, warning me that I shouldn't propose a rumble with any of these guys because I would probably get one. I explained that alcoholic beverages were not responsible for my proposal the previous night and that drinking a beer would just mellow me out.

"Question asked of an instructor that led to most extra work for everyone" It was a very simple question, really - I even waited until after class was over to ask whether this particular extension of the theoretical model that I had been thinking about could be tested using the techniques we had discussed that day in class. He said yes and told me to remind him to mention something about this when we reconvened on Thurs. But on Thursday he told the class that he had written a new homework assignment "Inspired by Sally" which was basically to have us test the thing I was asking about. He found a dataset that had the variables I had mentioned, so I'll do the analysis and see if I'm right.

"The Smoothie Award" was suggested by one person for what was basically the "Best completely out of nowhere funny invocation of the inside joke of the week embedded in a very serious and relevant question that the guest speaker got excited about because it is 'the primary criticism that economists make about the technique' he was discussing while everyone else in the room tried not to die laughing." My roommate suggested that once it was established that I made the joke purposely (apparently my insertion of this comment into the question was so smooth and my demeanor so serious that people couldn't tell for sure whether I did it on purpose), the guys on the back row were going to fall at my feet. For the record, my second question was the "second most common criticism that economists make" about the technique and he was very excited by that comment as well. (The speaker himself was an economist.) When the speaker told me that I have the makings of an economist, I didn't quite know how to respond. I decided to let him think I was a wildlife biologist with brilliant instincts. The truth is that I had not been at all familiar with the thing he was talking about, but as I told someone later, supply and demand is not a totally unfamiliar concept to me.

My favorite thing about the economist's presentation was his response to a question posed by an actual wildlife biologist - "Why do you say that something has to be scarce to have economic value?" The economist had a verbal response to this, but he accompanied it with a nifty little drawing that I will reproduce here. I found it quite eloquent.