AY2015/2016, Semester 2
CH1101E Introduction to Chinese Studies (汉学导论)
The first half of the module (Chinese History) was interesting. You learn about the origins of the Chinese race, and how the Han Chinese today is VERY different (genetically) from the people of the Han Dynasty. Topics covered in this part includes how historical events are recorded, how knowledge are classified, the origins of Chinese characters, and the philosophy of the Han Dynasty’s political system. The lecturer placed great emphasis on objectivity and critical thinking but he ALWAYS go off-topic. Well, at least he doesn’t test the topics that he didn’t manage to cover. The lecturer is also quite eccentric (plain weird IMO). The second part was on Chinese Literature. The content is more abstract, mainly interpreting literature pieces (poems and operas) and understanding how urban planning and policies shaped the culture of different dynasties. Thought this part would be better since I enjoyed Higher Chinese and did well for it, but nah, totally not my cup of tea. Did well for the 15% history quiz, average for the literature quiz, but totally flunked the 40% project and didn’t posted anything in the forum (contributing to class part). Oops. I did my project under History but was totally clueless of the lecturer’s requirement and he’s just being plain weird (thus not helpful at all) when I asked him through email. All he said was that my paper don’t fit his requirement and he can’t help me. Like what? So I had to change my topic and redo my entire paper in 2 days (and I still have no idea what I wrote LOL). B- for the paper :/ maybe I should have taken CL1101E instead. Oh, by the way, everything is in Chinese. The lecture, the tutorial, the quizzes, the project and the IVLE announcements are all in Chinese.
Grading: 30% In-class Quizzes, 30% Tutorial/Forum participation, 40% Individual Project.
Grade: C+ (Depressing max)
EC4304 Economic & Financial Forecasting
This is a new module offered this academic year. Basically deals with common forecasting models using the trend-seasonality-cycle approach. Same old stuff from EC3304/EC4303/EC4334: AR, MA, VAR, ARCH, GARCH but with greater emphasis on the practical implementations, so there’s a lot of STATA and R coding in the assignments and the group project. There is also more qualitative comparison of information/selection criteria and forecast evaluations. An oversight in the fundamental and the lack in project breadth were costly for our group project. Final exam was a rush against time since the paper wasn’t meant to be completed in 2 hours (Dr. Tkachenko said it himself). Very qualitative paper with a lot of emphasis on describing forecasting procedures, discussing pros and cons of models and forecasting evaluations. I have a love-hate relationship with the weekly reflections. We had to write a short reflection on each chapter of “Signal & Noises” by Nate Silver. It was an interesting read, but I find it very time-consuming. Especially when I’m in the burning-out phase of my honours thesis. Maybe it would be much better with a normal workload. Overall, it is a great module because it requires students to be familiar with the statistical tools at the end of the semester, but the content-wise I find it a tad boring.
Grading: 10% Weekly Reflections, 30% Assignments, 30% Group Project, 30% Final Exam.
Grade: B+
EC4401 Honours Thesis
Education Choice, Growth, and Inequality: Fierce Tigers or Cuddly Pandas?
While everyone’s thesis topic is different, there are some questions that are common. Micro or macro? Which branch of it? Theoretical or empirical? What is the research question? Which professor is the appropriate supervisor? These were the few of many questions in my mind last December. Imagine this, you are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you have a compass, and you remember the world map but not its scale. Now you choose any continent/country, and start swimming towards it. Your objective is to reach that continent in a given amount of time. You might drown, get attack by a shark, lose your compass along the way. A slightly wrong direction and you end up in the wrong place. Worse of them all, you don’t know how long it takes to get there. That’s how it feels like initially.
The most important thing is to know how well you swim, and how far is your destination. Identify what you know best and what you like best, sometimes you don’t get the best of both worlds. That’s my first step. For me, it was clear that I wanted to write a theoretical paper in macroeconomics, but it took me the whole of the previous semester to decide between monetary and growth theory. I read widely on the things that have been done, the methodology involved, and talked to different professors to know more about what is going on in the different fields. I even went back to all my notes/projects to seek inspiration. The next step is to find a suitable supervisor. I read through the publication lists of the professors, , came out with some sort of research outline, and started emailing suitable professors. Which professor is more suitable is really dependent on what you’re lacking most. Do you need more guidance in formulating the research question, or do you need someone that is familiar with the methodology involved? A suitable supervisor could be the life buoy you (desperately) need to stay afloat. Then you narrow down your topic to a very specific research question which you can (hopefully) answer precisely. With that specific direction, start swimming as fast as you can.
My own thesis journey was a (very) bumpy one. The first challenge is that my topic is not mainstream. There are a handful (literally less than five) of articles directly related to my topic, and only one of them is theoretical. The silver lining is that the contribution of my paper is easily original (doesn’t mean that it is an important one though). The next challenge was the limited amount of time available for thesis. I had 12 weeks. My supervisor’s (Prof Zhang Jie) advice is to finish the sketch of the model by the first month, spend the next month writing the introduction, and use the last month to polish the paper. I failed pretty badly with that timeline. I spent the first month reading journal articles, two to three a day, trying to find that one specific research question. It wasn’t till the end of the first month that I finalized my research question. Then I spent the next month attempting to formulate the problem mathematically and solving the model. I get stuck for hours then I switched to writing my introduction until I get that epiphany moment. This goes on all the way until the week before the submission deadline. Lastly, the most challenging part of the journey was the decision to remove one whole chapter from my thesis, just one day before the deadline. Consequently, I decided to submit my thesis a day late so that I could refine my thesis within the extra 24 hours. In fact, I had less than 16 hours because the next day was DU. If that’s not bad enough, I had an hour of sleep every night for the whole of that week. In hindsight, that was f**king scary. That is also the nightmare of writing a theoretical paper: you don’t know how long you need to solve the model until you actually solved it. Thankfully, it all worked out in the end (despite a few jarring typos that I found out later). Prof Zhang is a great supervisor if you are able to work very independently. He always give hints but do not answer questions directly. He would reply with the titles of journal articles instead. The rationale is to ensure I’m able sieve through the materials and find the answer for myself. In short, he guides you along but the onus is on yourself to make sure you are in the right direction in the first place.
All the sleepless nights, all the lecture hours (of other modules) spent on solving the model, and four years of knowledge culminating into 40 pages of words, figures and equations. I landed in unfamiliar waters, and I got out of it alive. It is truly a wonderful journey.
Grading: 10% Oral Presentation (Average of 2 Assessors), 15% Continuous Assessment (Supervisor), 75% Written Report (Average of Supervisor and 2 Assessors).
Grade: A (Triple-weighted :D)
EL1101E The Nature of English Language
The most interesting module for me this semester. Content is very straightforward, the topics covered are well organised, and the lectures are very engaging. Topics covered includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. 40% of the module goes to CA. There are weekly lecture quiz and participation, facilitated with the use of clickers. There was some connection issues toward the end of the semester, but it wasn’t an issue for most people. Also, the quizzes are held at the beginning of the lecture, so it is necessary to read the readings before the lecture. It’s also great that Leslie (the lecturer) always start the quizzes 5 minutes after lecture hours begin to accommodate students travelling to Utown from other faculties. The organisation of the lecture content following the quizzes focus on consolidating knowledge rather than imparting it. Personally, I find this teaching method very effective. Kudos to Leslie’s great teaching and his funny outbursts. Aside from the usual class participation from tutorial attendance and discussion, we also had to present our tutorial solutions for an assigned topic. The topics are allocated based on preference and balloting is used for tie-breakers (mine was morphology). Overall, it was an enjoyable learning experience.
Grading: 10% Lecture Quiz, 10% Lecture Participation, 10% Tutorial Participation, 10% Group Presentation, 30% Midterm Test, 30% Final Exam.
Grade: A
MA4266 Topology
General topology, or point-set topology, is the study of spaces. All kind of spaces. This module is the next level abstraction of its long list of prerequisites (MA1102R, MA2108, MA3110, MA3209). At the beginning of the module, there was also a short introduction to algebraic topology and the classification of shapes/spaces but it is unimportant for the rest of the course. First half of the module reviews set theory from MA1100 and concepts from MA3209 (open/closed sets, continuity, compactness, connectedness). A “topology” is a collection of open sets given any topological spaces, but the main difference is that the concept of “open sets” is defined by the topology endowed. So basically the MA3209 version of “open sets” is only one of many possible topologies (usually called the standard topology). Second half covers countability and separation axioms (too abstract to be explained), big theorems like Tychonoff Theorem and Urysohn’s Lemma, and extending the concepts to functional spaces. These topics are new and extremely abstract for me, but it seems like the pure math majors don’t struggle as much. Tutorials are quite a challenge but could be done if sufficient effort is devoted. Moreover, most solutions can be found online. The most interesting part of the module is the two reports assigned because its usually just problem sets, midterm test and final exam. Initially I thought I have to write essay reports (not proofs). However, upon clarification, we only have to understand the proofs in our choice of journal paper/textbook chapter, reorganize them, and present it in a coherent manner. The review report is a short introduction of the chosen text, whereas the reading report is an application summary with greater technical details. The reference paper for the reports need not be the same. The rationale behind the reports is to encourage independent learning and allow students to learn different applications of topology (chemistry/physics/economics) according to their interests. As such, I did my reading report on the application of topology to microeconomics, particularly, the application of Lefschetz Fixed Point Theorem and Poincare-Hopf Theorem (results from algebraic topology) to the study of equilibria stability in general equilibrium theory and game theory. It was an interesting, albeit difficult, learning journey because of the obscurity of algebraic topology in mainstream microeconomics. Final exam was neither easy nor difficult, and the difficulty of each question rises with the question number LOL. Content is also quite heavy because there is no midterm test to split the load. Overall, I enjoyed the module despite its difficulty.
Grading: 10% Lecture/Tutorial Attendance, 10% Tutorial Participation, 15% Review Report, 15% Reading Report, 50% Final Exam.
Grade: B+
Ending Note
Woohoo last oneeeee and longest everrrrr! SAP 4.41 was much lower than expected because I totally didn’t see that C+ coming. Didn’t do as well for EC4304 and MA4266 because I’m always solving models for my thesis during the classes LOL. I had 4 days to study for EC4304 final exam but I was so burnt out from thesis and the four project deadlines (and DP/DU) in the following week that I procrastinated to the very last day. 65 MCs over the year is really GG shagballz ttm never again. Luckily, CAP still maintained the increasing streak from 3.00 in year 1 to 4.07 at the end of year 4. It’s not how you begin but how you end, hopefully it’s also an inspiration for the freshies who are discouraged. IT’S NOT TOO LATE. Really thankful for all the encouragement and support I’ve received over the years. Lastly, BALI & SEOUL, I’M COMING!
The first half of the module (Chinese History) was interesting. You learn about the origins of the Chinese race, and how the Han Chinese today is VERY different (genetically) from the people of the Han Dynasty. Topics covered in this part includes how historical events are recorded, how knowledge are classified, the origins of Chinese characters, and the philosophy of the Han Dynasty’s political system. The lecturer placed great emphasis on objectivity and critical thinking but he ALWAYS go off-topic. Well, at least he doesn’t test the topics that he didn’t manage to cover. The lecturer is also quite eccentric (plain weird IMO). The second part was on Chinese Literature. The content is more abstract, mainly interpreting literature pieces (poems and operas) and understanding how urban planning and policies shaped the culture of different dynasties. Thought this part would be better since I enjoyed Higher Chinese and did well for it, but nah, totally not my cup of tea. Did well for the 15% history quiz, average for the literature quiz, but totally flunked the 40% project and didn’t posted anything in the forum (contributing to class part). Oops. I did my project under History but was totally clueless of the lecturer’s requirement and he’s just being plain weird (thus not helpful at all) when I asked him through email. All he said was that my paper don’t fit his requirement and he can’t help me. Like what? So I had to change my topic and redo my entire paper in 2 days (and I still have no idea what I wrote LOL). B- for the paper :/ maybe I should have taken CL1101E instead. Oh, by the way, everything is in Chinese. The lecture, the tutorial, the quizzes, the project and the IVLE announcements are all in Chinese.
Grading: 30% In-class Quizzes, 30% Tutorial/Forum participation, 40% Individual Project.
Grade: C+ (Depressing max)
EC4304 Economic & Financial Forecasting
This is a new module offered this academic year. Basically deals with common forecasting models using the trend-seasonality-cycle approach. Same old stuff from EC3304/EC4303/EC4334: AR, MA, VAR, ARCH, GARCH but with greater emphasis on the practical implementations, so there’s a lot of STATA and R coding in the assignments and the group project. There is also more qualitative comparison of information/selection criteria and forecast evaluations. An oversight in the fundamental and the lack in project breadth were costly for our group project. Final exam was a rush against time since the paper wasn’t meant to be completed in 2 hours (Dr. Tkachenko said it himself). Very qualitative paper with a lot of emphasis on describing forecasting procedures, discussing pros and cons of models and forecasting evaluations. I have a love-hate relationship with the weekly reflections. We had to write a short reflection on each chapter of “Signal & Noises” by Nate Silver. It was an interesting read, but I find it very time-consuming. Especially when I’m in the burning-out phase of my honours thesis. Maybe it would be much better with a normal workload. Overall, it is a great module because it requires students to be familiar with the statistical tools at the end of the semester, but the content-wise I find it a tad boring.
Grading: 10% Weekly Reflections, 30% Assignments, 30% Group Project, 30% Final Exam.
Grade: B+
EC4401 Honours Thesis
Education Choice, Growth, and Inequality: Fierce Tigers or Cuddly Pandas?
While everyone’s thesis topic is different, there are some questions that are common. Micro or macro? Which branch of it? Theoretical or empirical? What is the research question? Which professor is the appropriate supervisor? These were the few of many questions in my mind last December. Imagine this, you are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you have a compass, and you remember the world map but not its scale. Now you choose any continent/country, and start swimming towards it. Your objective is to reach that continent in a given amount of time. You might drown, get attack by a shark, lose your compass along the way. A slightly wrong direction and you end up in the wrong place. Worse of them all, you don’t know how long it takes to get there. That’s how it feels like initially.
The most important thing is to know how well you swim, and how far is your destination. Identify what you know best and what you like best, sometimes you don’t get the best of both worlds. That’s my first step. For me, it was clear that I wanted to write a theoretical paper in macroeconomics, but it took me the whole of the previous semester to decide between monetary and growth theory. I read widely on the things that have been done, the methodology involved, and talked to different professors to know more about what is going on in the different fields. I even went back to all my notes/projects to seek inspiration. The next step is to find a suitable supervisor. I read through the publication lists of the professors, , came out with some sort of research outline, and started emailing suitable professors. Which professor is more suitable is really dependent on what you’re lacking most. Do you need more guidance in formulating the research question, or do you need someone that is familiar with the methodology involved? A suitable supervisor could be the life buoy you (desperately) need to stay afloat. Then you narrow down your topic to a very specific research question which you can (hopefully) answer precisely. With that specific direction, start swimming as fast as you can.
My own thesis journey was a (very) bumpy one. The first challenge is that my topic is not mainstream. There are a handful (literally less than five) of articles directly related to my topic, and only one of them is theoretical. The silver lining is that the contribution of my paper is easily original (doesn’t mean that it is an important one though). The next challenge was the limited amount of time available for thesis. I had 12 weeks. My supervisor’s (Prof Zhang Jie) advice is to finish the sketch of the model by the first month, spend the next month writing the introduction, and use the last month to polish the paper. I failed pretty badly with that timeline. I spent the first month reading journal articles, two to three a day, trying to find that one specific research question. It wasn’t till the end of the first month that I finalized my research question. Then I spent the next month attempting to formulate the problem mathematically and solving the model. I get stuck for hours then I switched to writing my introduction until I get that epiphany moment. This goes on all the way until the week before the submission deadline. Lastly, the most challenging part of the journey was the decision to remove one whole chapter from my thesis, just one day before the deadline. Consequently, I decided to submit my thesis a day late so that I could refine my thesis within the extra 24 hours. In fact, I had less than 16 hours because the next day was DU. If that’s not bad enough, I had an hour of sleep every night for the whole of that week. In hindsight, that was f**king scary. That is also the nightmare of writing a theoretical paper: you don’t know how long you need to solve the model until you actually solved it. Thankfully, it all worked out in the end (despite a few jarring typos that I found out later). Prof Zhang is a great supervisor if you are able to work very independently. He always give hints but do not answer questions directly. He would reply with the titles of journal articles instead. The rationale is to ensure I’m able sieve through the materials and find the answer for myself. In short, he guides you along but the onus is on yourself to make sure you are in the right direction in the first place.
All the sleepless nights, all the lecture hours (of other modules) spent on solving the model, and four years of knowledge culminating into 40 pages of words, figures and equations. I landed in unfamiliar waters, and I got out of it alive. It is truly a wonderful journey.
Grading: 10% Oral Presentation (Average of 2 Assessors), 15% Continuous Assessment (Supervisor), 75% Written Report (Average of Supervisor and 2 Assessors).
Grade: A (Triple-weighted :D)
EL1101E The Nature of English Language
The most interesting module for me this semester. Content is very straightforward, the topics covered are well organised, and the lectures are very engaging. Topics covered includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. 40% of the module goes to CA. There are weekly lecture quiz and participation, facilitated with the use of clickers. There was some connection issues toward the end of the semester, but it wasn’t an issue for most people. Also, the quizzes are held at the beginning of the lecture, so it is necessary to read the readings before the lecture. It’s also great that Leslie (the lecturer) always start the quizzes 5 minutes after lecture hours begin to accommodate students travelling to Utown from other faculties. The organisation of the lecture content following the quizzes focus on consolidating knowledge rather than imparting it. Personally, I find this teaching method very effective. Kudos to Leslie’s great teaching and his funny outbursts. Aside from the usual class participation from tutorial attendance and discussion, we also had to present our tutorial solutions for an assigned topic. The topics are allocated based on preference and balloting is used for tie-breakers (mine was morphology). Overall, it was an enjoyable learning experience.
Grading: 10% Lecture Quiz, 10% Lecture Participation, 10% Tutorial Participation, 10% Group Presentation, 30% Midterm Test, 30% Final Exam.
Grade: A
MA4266 Topology
General topology, or point-set topology, is the study of spaces. All kind of spaces. This module is the next level abstraction of its long list of prerequisites (MA1102R, MA2108, MA3110, MA3209). At the beginning of the module, there was also a short introduction to algebraic topology and the classification of shapes/spaces but it is unimportant for the rest of the course. First half of the module reviews set theory from MA1100 and concepts from MA3209 (open/closed sets, continuity, compactness, connectedness). A “topology” is a collection of open sets given any topological spaces, but the main difference is that the concept of “open sets” is defined by the topology endowed. So basically the MA3209 version of “open sets” is only one of many possible topologies (usually called the standard topology). Second half covers countability and separation axioms (too abstract to be explained), big theorems like Tychonoff Theorem and Urysohn’s Lemma, and extending the concepts to functional spaces. These topics are new and extremely abstract for me, but it seems like the pure math majors don’t struggle as much. Tutorials are quite a challenge but could be done if sufficient effort is devoted. Moreover, most solutions can be found online. The most interesting part of the module is the two reports assigned because its usually just problem sets, midterm test and final exam. Initially I thought I have to write essay reports (not proofs). However, upon clarification, we only have to understand the proofs in our choice of journal paper/textbook chapter, reorganize them, and present it in a coherent manner. The review report is a short introduction of the chosen text, whereas the reading report is an application summary with greater technical details. The reference paper for the reports need not be the same. The rationale behind the reports is to encourage independent learning and allow students to learn different applications of topology (chemistry/physics/economics) according to their interests. As such, I did my reading report on the application of topology to microeconomics, particularly, the application of Lefschetz Fixed Point Theorem and Poincare-Hopf Theorem (results from algebraic topology) to the study of equilibria stability in general equilibrium theory and game theory. It was an interesting, albeit difficult, learning journey because of the obscurity of algebraic topology in mainstream microeconomics. Final exam was neither easy nor difficult, and the difficulty of each question rises with the question number LOL. Content is also quite heavy because there is no midterm test to split the load. Overall, I enjoyed the module despite its difficulty.
Grading: 10% Lecture/Tutorial Attendance, 10% Tutorial Participation, 15% Review Report, 15% Reading Report, 50% Final Exam.
Grade: B+
Ending Note
Woohoo last oneeeee and longest everrrrr! SAP 4.41 was much lower than expected because I totally didn’t see that C+ coming. Didn’t do as well for EC4304 and MA4266 because I’m always solving models for my thesis during the classes LOL. I had 4 days to study for EC4304 final exam but I was so burnt out from thesis and the four project deadlines (and DP/DU) in the following week that I procrastinated to the very last day. 65 MCs over the year is really GG shagballz ttm never again. Luckily, CAP still maintained the increasing streak from 3.00 in year 1 to 4.07 at the end of year 4. It’s not how you begin but how you end, hopefully it’s also an inspiration for the freshies who are discouraged. IT’S NOT TOO LATE. Really thankful for all the encouragement and support I’ve received over the years. Lastly, BALI & SEOUL, I’M COMING!