Padgett Post 8/25

Howdy! I'm Beckie Padgett, and I hail from the great state of Texas. Let me introduce myself as well. I was born on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, Japan, and I'm half-Japanese. It's been about eight years since I graduated from Northwestern University where I majored in psychology and international studies with a concentration in Asia. Through t he JET Programme, I taught English for a year in Yokohama, Japan and enjoyed spending time with family. Unfortunately, I'm not fluent in Japanese though! After returning to the U.S., I held several positions in the private sector in industries ranging from consulting to financial services to investment banking.

My transition from the corporate world back into academia has been challenging yet exciting. I'm currently taking the summer prep Quantitative Methods (QM) course and having flashbacks to high school math class. I'm embarrassed to say that I was once the high school Math Club President and I took a year of Calculus in college. However, it has been SO long that I definitely needed this refresher course.

On the first day of prep, I was so excited to meet so many new people, the course reader seemed basic, the prof seemed laid-back...THEN the prof told us to do some practice exercises. I stared at the problems blankly and started to panic! I asked myself, "Why is this so hard? Am I the only retarded person in this room?" I quickly learned to solicit help from the TAs and my peers. I discovered that working through the problems collaboratively makes the learning process better. I also assisted others which reinforced my understanding of the material. During the TA session, we reviewed over every detail of each exercise, and by the end of the day, I felt very satisfied about the concepts. Throughout the week, the TA sessions have been quite helpful with both QM and all kinds of IR/PS things, such as using TritonLink, navigating through FirstClass, etc...

The use of laptops in learning Excel helps to break up the class time, and I am learning to love the program. In my previous work, I used Excel quite often but not for graphing and calculating logarithms, absolute values, etc... So I am amazed about all of the Excel functions and shortcuts (remember...I didn't even have the Internet way back when I was in high school).

Summer prep has not only served as a refresher in mathematical concepts but also as a refresher in how to be a student. By eliminating my full-time job, use of my car (because I'm too cheap to pay for parking) and my regular paycheck, I am remembering how different student life is. Of course, I got lost on campus looking for the office to get my student I.D. I've also had to learn the bus system and how to pack my lunch every day. I feel very lucky to be doing these administrative things now so that I can focus on classes later.

The best part of my first week was getting a chance to meet the others from foreign countries - China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Hearing their perspectives of living in San Diego has been great fun, and I'm looking forward to more next week!

--Beckie Padgett

beckiepadgett@gmail.com