Climbing up a growing mountain

I have never been a fan of rock climbing and whenever anyone starts talking about it, all of my insides usually start twisting inside of me. It's called 'fear of heights' or acrophobia. Here though, I would like to mention one of my class experiences.

It is good that my professors are very smart. Learning from the smart and knowledgeable people, though it doesn't necessarily 'make' the student knowledgeable, does add something to the knowledge of the student. Certainly, it adds more insight to the lecture and makes it more interesting. Sometimes a professor's intelligence may seem counterproductive especially when the knowledge 'gap' between the student and the professor is very large.

In one of my classes, Statistics and Probability, our professor is Essie, an Iranian genius. He is a wonderful man, with a voice worth using for the recording of children's bedtime stories, good sense of humor, and a great attitude towards econometrics and his students. However, it seems that he was not given the ability to 'come down' to his students in terms of the material he is teaching. And so, much of his lectures are filled with 'random' formulas appearing on the dry-erase board. The formulas have no names (or at least no names that could be comprehensibly written down in my notes for future reference). They are long and complex, something you cannot Google... They come from some unknown spot in the textbook.

However, knowing that we are using the textbook and that the professor 'is' referring to is (but I can't really confirm that), I decided to study the textbook beginning with chapter one onwards. The pace of my studying is very slow - 2 or 3 subchapters per day (including assigned exercises) while Essie is moving at a pace of about 8 subchapters per lecture. And so, this whole process of me studying feels like I am climbing an ever-growing mountain, which is growing at a faster pace than I am able to climb at. I am sure I could even come up with an equation for this :).

For now, I will just keep climbing and hope that one day I will be so intelligent and will be able to catch up with the mountain. I have to by the time our core exams come anyways...

What's New

As I was writing an e-mail to my friend Barb, I realized that perhaps I should share the information here too. Maybe that is what I should have done in the first place. Here is an update on my life:

Atlanta downtown from the Turner Field

The first couple weeks here were very new to me, new people, new professors, new teaching style, new weather, and a new city. Classes here are not like in college, here the professor uses the class time to tell us what we should know and we go home and study that. I was not used to this at all, but now it's ok and so I am fine with having just three classes take up all of my free time. The first exam went better than I thought and I passed my first class (it was only a pass-fail grade). I think we learned about 1 semester of math per day and it was truly a fast pace :D.

Part of our class hiked the Stone Mountain

I also never thought that there were any Christians in our class until I went to the IVCF Graduate Christian Fellowship where I was one of my classmates, Jing, from China. Jing is a very sweet girl and her life journey is very similar to mine. She is also the only child. I have also found out just recently that a 3rd year student in our department (also Jing, but a different one) is also a Christian. However, I went to the concert with the 1st Jing, my classmate. It was a wonderful concert and it was for free (organized by The Fish radio station). Jing, who never had a funnel cake, really wanted one, and I think funnel cakes do go well with outdoors concerts and so we set on this journey of waiting in line for 2 hours to get a delicious funnel cake. So we missed the concerts of Natalie Grant and Big Daddy Weave. We did get to see the concert of Switchfoot which was great and soon e both ended up jumping and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. :D

Jing and I with our Funnel Cakes

Our school year has already started. We have only 3 classes - Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, and Statistics and Probability. Our macro professor has not arrived yet because of some visa issues, so we just have his lecture notes and a very difficult assignment that although is due in two weeks, not even the 5th year students know how to solve - it is a programming problem set.

Also, I have been trying to go to different churches around. The first church was quite unwelcoming, but the other two (all PCA) were good. The church that I went to yesterday is my favorite so far. There are perhaps 3oo people at the service, they worship with both hymns and contemporary music and the pastor is very much awesome. His message was so deep and yet very well understandable and applicable. I think I really liked his teaching. They were also baptizing babies yesterday, which was really cute :). After the service, I joined the 'Young Singles' group for a bible study and talking. It was very good to see some people of my age who were all so friendly and godly :) I think I will definitely go back to this church.

As for exercise, I have joined the girls' ultimate frisbee team and also our department's soccer team. This way, I 'tricked' my body into exercising while having fun :) I also went to see the Braves yesterday, but that is no exercise and the cheesy nachos I ate were so good!

At the Braves' Game

Also, I forgot to mention our hummingbirds. I bought them a feeder so that they would come more often. I even took a picture of one :)