Ari Schwartz, post for 8/23

I’m Ari Schwartz, and I’ll be one of your student bloggers.  I am, at the moment, taking the quantitative methods class.  But allow me a few lines—or paragraphs, depending on how things go-- to introduce myself, and I’ll get right back to that…

 

I’m a San Fernando Valley native who has attempted to disavow his “Valley boy” birthright and instead take on “Angelino” status.  That worked well for me when I went to UCLA, as I could honestly say that I lived in LA.  Unfortunately, my propensity to drop about 50 “likes” into every sentence that comes out of my mouth doesn’t help me in my quest to not be seen as part of the SF Valley.  Oh well, whatever…

 

I majored in poli sci and minored in Japanese while at UCLA.  I spent 6 months of my undergrad experience in Japan, and a quarter at the UCDC center—the UCDC center is, quite aptly, the UC campus in Washington, DC.  After graduating, I moved back to Japan for the JET Programme (see, by using the British spelling, they can show how cultured they are).  There, I spent a year teaching rural Japanese rugrats how to sing songs that we won’t even teach our own children for fear of being shunned as uncool.

 

The bulk of my free time is either spent running or playing World of Warcraft.  For those of you who have no idea what “World of Warcraft” means, I offer you this definition:

 

World of Warcraft—n.  1.  digital crack  2.  grade deflator

 

But if you partake in this awful habit, then tell me.  I’m always looking for fellow addicts to discuss my problem with…or to go kill things and get phat lootz…

 

So now for what I’m sure you’re all very excited to read about:  quantitative methods.  To be honest, I was a bit nervous at first.  The last math class I took in college was my freshman year, and it was a statistics for social science students (e.g. people too lazy to take the real thing) course.  After that, I found that none of my undergrad classes required much mathematical ability outside of the occasional regression analysis…which Excel does for you anyway.  So yeah, I was a bit nervous.

 

But it hasn’t been bad so far.  At all.  In fact, I’ve really enjoyed learning some nifty tools in Excel, as well as getting my brain back into “academic” mode after being in cruise for a year or so.  So while I don’t have much to say about the material as of today (it still hasn’t really gone past anything harder than the GRE yet), I can definitely say that the opportunity to meet new students, interact with current students and a professor, and get to explore the campus a bit in the capacity of an actual student has been worthwhile.

--Ari Schwartz

uclari@gmail.com