Pe­riod 5 at Maas­tricht Uni­ver­sity – sum­mary

Wednes­day, 27^th June 2012 – Uni­ver­sity – perma­link

Pe­riod 5 is the last pe­riod for mas­ter stu­dents who started in Sep­tem­ber. Last courses, tu­to­ri­als, exams, fin­ish­ing mas­ter the­sis. I also had my last courses but I also man­aged to work at the Uni­ver­sity and to enjoy trav­el­ling a bit.

Spring in Maas­tricht, source: my pic­ture

Tra­di­tion con­tin­ues and I look back again at pe­riod 5 of my In­fo­nom­ics study pro­gramme that just ended. It was ac­tu­ally last pe­riod when I had reg­u­lar courses, I am only left with the Mas­ter the­sis and skill course con­nected to that. Pretty good feel­ing I must say. Only the Mas­ter the­sis stands be­tween me and mas­ters de­gree. Well, but for now I will focus on the two courses and just passed and my life in the pre­vi­ous pe­riod. Both of my courses were com­pul­sory for In­fo­nom­ics mas­ter pro­gramme – In­ter­net Eco­nom­ics and In­tel­lec­tual cap­i­tal and knowl­edge sys­tems. Ac­tu­ally this pe­riod was pretty busy. Next to my own courses I was also tu­tor­ing at FASOS and work­ing on an in­tern­ship web­site for the Maas­tricht Uni­ver­sity. I man­aged to go for a week­end and Queens­day to Am­s­ter­dam and also for 4 days to Paris. I hosted my brother and 3 friends in the first week of May Maybe my time man­age­ment is get­ting bet­ter Let's start with my uni­ver­sity du­ties.

My Timetable of pe­riod 5

As in the pre­vi­ous pe­riod 4 I had free Wednes­day and Fri­day. We agreed on meet­ing only once a week for In­ter­net Eco­nom­ics, but then we also had an extra tu­to­r­ial in the exam week. I was tu­tor­ing on Mon­days, Tues­days, Thurs­days and Fri­days – 3 Groups and each group twice a week. Pretty busy sched­ule, but I liked it.

In­tel­lec­tual cap­i­tal and knowl­edge sys­tems

The title of the course may be a bit mis­guid­ing. The real con­tent of the course was human cap­i­tal the­ory and re­search con­nected to that. Every sec­ond meet­ing was fo­cused on em­pir­i­cal re­sults, we were given datasets, ques­tions to an­swer and ac­cess to STATA. Let's play I liked this ap­proach, be­cause we weren't just read­ing ar­ti­cles and dis­cussing their con­tent, but we also learned how to apply the the­ory and how to op­er­ate Stata. I had pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ence with this soft­ware, so some com­mands were fa­mil­iar to me, but I also learned new stuff. And we should not for­get that "prac­tice makes per­fect".

The grad­ing of the course was based on par­tic­i­pa­tion (25%), paper (25%) and writ­ten final exam (50%). I would per­son­ally put more weight on the paper, be­cause every­body spent a lot of time with it and it was of a real added value. Final exam was based on the lit­er­a­ture we read and dis­cussed in the tu­to­r­ial ses­sion and we also had to in­ter­pret some Stata out­put. As it was writ­ten and we were like 15 peo­ple en­rolled in the course, we wrote that as usual in MECC. I hoped that it was my last visit of that place at such oc­ca­sion. For some of my col­leagues it was the last course, last tu­to­r­ial and also the last exam at uni­ver­sity in their lives. That de­served some cel­e­bra­tion, right? We went to Erwin's place, pre­pared din­ner, drank beer, had fun, later in the night went to play some bil­liard, then back as the city was com­pletely empty and played Wii be­fore we went to bed. Awe­some day.

In­ter­net Eco­nom­ics

The course was not only fo­cused on the In­ter­net but in more gen­er­ally net­work in­dus­tries, tech­nol­ogy, adop­tion of stan­dards and also a bit of auc­tion the­ory, as it was field of in­ter­est of our great tutor Kyle Hyn­d­man. We fol­lowed a book called "The eco­nom­ics of Net­work in­dus­tries" by Oz Shy. Next to that we had for each topic a few more or less re­cent eco­nomic ar­ti­cles. Ac­tu­ally good com­bi­na­tion. We were only mas­ter stu­dents of In­fo­nom­ics, there­fore tiny group of 4 peo­ple. I didn't miss any class but some­times we were only 3 at the meet­ing – tutor and 2 stu­dents. That's not ideal com­po­si­tion of PBL sys­tem. Ac­tu­ally, this course would be much bet­ter if there were also lec­tures not only PBL ses­sions. I think Kyle knows that there­fore he some­times pre­pared a pre­sen­ta­tion of some ex­er­cises for us. The con­tent of the course was a bit re­lated to mi­cro­eco­nom­ics, as we used sim­ple util­ity func­tions and some profit cal­cu­la­tions. Basic stuff. For me, the most in­ter­est­ing parts were auc­tions. It was some­thing new and also con­nected to real life sit­u­a­tions.

We were asked to write a paper in groups (well as we were 4, we cre­ated 2 groups by 2), pre­sent it and this counted for 25% of the grade. An­other 25% was the par­tic­i­pa­tion and 50% was the take-home exam. Never heard of? It's like huge as­sign­ment with quite spe­cific ques­tions and some top­ics for half-page long es­says. I ac­tu­ally en­joyed solv­ing it, even if I was not com­pletely sure whether I am on the right track. We had about 10 days for the exam, which was enough as I spent like 2.5 days with it.

Free time

Since the 5th pe­riod started after Easter, con­di­tions for the trav­el­ling were the best since I got here in Sep­tem­ber (ok, Sep­tem­ber was pretty awe­some too). I missed a few op­por­tu­ni­ties to visit some of my friends who are/were also on Eras­mus abroad, but I didn't have much time to spare this pe­riod. At least I man­aged to make two great trips – for 3 days to Am­s­ter­dam and then I went for 4 days to Paris. I hope I will visit some in­ter­est­ing place in the next pe­riod too.

I con­tin­ued with salsa lessons on Tues­day nights and I also went to salsa par­ties on Fri­day nights at Stay Okay hos­tel. I didn't see Adam, Aidas and other from Mi­cro­eco­nom­ics course this pe­riod, which is a pity, we must get bet­ter in that next pe­riod. Play­ing card games is fun I hosted 3 times some­one in Maas­tricht and I man­aged to see the Maas­tricht un­der­ground – the caves from lime­stone min­ing as well as the cat­a­combs cre­ated for pro­tec­tion of the city.

Work­ing – tu­tor­ing at FASOS

Some of you may know that I also got a job as a tutor at FASOS (Fac­ulty of Arts and So­cial Sci­ences) in two courses – Mak­ing a Eu­ro­pean Mar­ket and In­ter­na­tional Eco­nom­ics. Both are 2-year bach­e­lor courses manda­tory for stu­dents of Eu­ro­pean Stud­ies pro­gramme. They need to write a paper and have writ­ten exam at the end. I love teach­ing, it's fun even if it's not easy all the time. I had 3 groups 2 times a week for 2 hours. Well, the con­tent of the course is pretty con­dense and ex­ten­sive so es­pe­cially at the be­gin­ning of the pe­riod the 2 hours were not enough to go though all the learn­ing goals prop­erly. But we some­how man­aged to over­come all the dif­fi­cul­ties and I think the stu­dents learned quite some­thing. I don't know if I was their favourite tutor but when I asked what they think about the tu­to­ri­als, I only got pos­i­tive feed­back, which was pleas­ant to hear.I would be in­ter­ested to know how many of my stu­dents passed the final exam.

Over­all, I think the pe­riod 5 was a suc­cess. I did many var­i­ous things and I did it good. I en­joyed it most of the time, I got my best (9) and worse (8) grades in this pe­riod.