Frustrations: the bishops and birth control, grad school and Good Friday

Most of the time, I don't find it much of a struggle to be both liberal and Catholic.  My conscience is clear.  Both identities affirm my values and challenge me to grow as a person.  Both push me to look beyond myself and to care for the world around me.  Neither is easy, but both are personally rewarding.  Internally, I am at peace with the allegiances I have chosen--enough so that I am comfortable recognizing them as allegiances.

But maintaining both identities can be frustrating on occasion.  I am lucky enough to have a large group of friends who share both my political religious values (whether specifically as Catholics, or simply as people who belong to an organized religion and try to live according to their faith).  But sometimes I feel caught between a secular world with a fierce concern for social justice and an deep skepticism of organized religion, and a religious world with an equally deep and abiding skepticism of the broad goals of social equality that my liberal friends take for granted.

Right now I feel caught in the middle.  Caught between a Church that seems to be proud of trumpeting its utterly gothic attitudes about women and a secular world that has little room or respect for religious practice.

"It'll put hair on your chests"

In my graduate program, men outnumber women by a 2:1 ratio, more or less.  Women make up 30% of my class, which is pretty normal, both in my department and in economics graduate programs generally.  There are a few programs where the gender ratios are even more skewed (Maryland comes to mind), but that's generally how it goes.  And I will say, the schools are thinking about it.  Most of them want a higher proportion of women, though they vary in what/how much they're willing to do to attract them.  It may not be seen as super-high priority, but it's an issue that departments are well-aware of and that they take fairly seriously.

My department's faculty is similarly skewed, except somewhat worse.  Again, this is the case in almost every economics department, not a particular feature of my school.  In fact, my program is notable for having a couple of very high-profile women faculty (though sadly one of them just left).

Honestly, most of the time I don't notice that I'm surrounded by men.

Because football is not rape

I had a Feminist Moment during econometrics this morning.

In my program, the first-year econometrics lectures are in 2-hour blocks, so we generally take a 5-minute break in the middle of class.  During the break today, a couple of the guys were talking about football.  We'll call one of them Classmate A and the other Classmate B. (Thankfully, Classmate A does not actually belong to my cohort, meaning he's taking my class but not in my program.)

So they're talking about football, and Classmate A says, "Stanford got raped by Oregon this weekend."

First thoughts on graduate school in economics

At this point I'm roughly a quarter of the way through my first year of graduate school in economics.  And I'm glad to be doing it.  I am frustrated by the things that I expected to find frustrating (it's all math, which is fine in and of itself, but macro is frustrating because there's very little attention given to whether particular tools are applicable in various situations... I'm hoping that part comes later, but I'm not holding my breath).  I'm also enjoying the things I expected to enjoy (there's some nice math, and a lot of interesting ideas).

A few observations that should be obvious, but continue to be overwhelming:

1.  Grad school is exhausting.  You can never master everything, but you have to try.  There is never an end in sight.
2.  You are always behind, no matter what you do.  This is particularly true for Americans, who tend to have less preparation than the European or east Asian students.
3.  You can understand everything if you come in knowing a lot of math but very little economics, just like everyone will tell you.  But you will have to spend a lot of time learning foundational concepts, notations, and terminology that most of your classmates take for granted.
4.  Just because you majored in math doesn't mean you're familiar or practiced with a lot of the computational skills that you will need for economics.  You will learn those skills, but they will also take time to develop.

Of course, if you're thinking about graduate school in economics everyone will tell you the first two things.  And the third and fourth should have been obvious, in retrospect.  But all four are survivable, or at least I hope so.  It's still to early to say.