The UCLA Fly-Out

So I'm a day late in posting. Apologies. I've been working on my senior thesis and the ball has finally gotten rolling. I guess that is another post though. On to UCLA:

I left Stanford in the middle of a seminar on sub-prime lending and its effect on house prices. I then took the long walk from the Economics department to the train station, got to the airport and started going through the NELS dataset looking for relevant variables as I waited for the plane to board. The flight was very quick, by the time we took off and I finished looking through the magazines they served some drinks and then the captain came on saying we were 15 mins away.

I touched down around 3:30 and took a taxi to the UCLA campus. Traffic was horrendous as the stereotype demands and I didnt get to the Economics department until about 4:15. I entered the seminar room with a professor with an accent talking about his work. The day was supposed to start around noon with a number of presentations and I was able to catch the middle of the applied micro groups talk which is what I am interested in anyway. As the man at the front ended his talk mentioning his current research on Social Security it finally clicked that this was Moshe Bushinsky, my advisor's advisor and co-author. It was nice to have a touch of familiarity in a foreign place. After he was done talking there was a Q&A period and people stuck around for a bit afterwards asking the normal questions on placement and general trends in the dicsipline.

I found a group of prospective students that were making their way to the bar that we were going to be having dinner at and so I tagged along and we reached there without much trouble. The rest of the night was devoted to socializing and there were a few professors there that I got the chance to speak which helped since I had missed most of the day. I got to see Dan Ackerberg who had just been at Stony Brook for a seminar so I got to talk to him some more about his work and his time at Yale doing his PhD. The people there were great and very interesting. One problem was the UCLA program was lacking any structure for Saturday, one was to spend it doing whatever they wanted, the department had nothing planned.

I opted to used Saturday to look around campus. It is a very beautiful place. The funny thing was that the building the Economics department is in is easily the ugliest building on campus and sticks out like a sore-thumb. Everywhere you look you see aesthetically pleasing building and then you see Bunche Hall. Nonetheless the place was very nice as were the people. There did seem to be an intangible difference in students though. I couldn't put my finger on it but it seemed like the students at Stanford and Yale were a bit more focused than the students at UCLA but that could be me projecting what I figured I would see.

Overall it was a nice trip and I got to see a small part of LA. For the sake of continuity there was also another freaky street sign I found walking towards the apartment of the graduate students that I was staying with:


I couldn't get away from it. It was calling me! Twice! Once in Palo Alto and again in Los Angeles. I'm not superstitious though so it didn't really phase me. It was just funny to keep seeing it around. They had a graduate student party Saturday night and I had them drop my off at the airport and I got on my way home Sunday morning. It was a nice trip and helped me solidify my choice- but that seems like a topic for my next post.

Check back soon ;)

That's all for now.

More Later!