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I went to Davis yesterday for a visit with the faculty and graduate students in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics. The visit was to last from 10am to 3pm, each of the 7 faculty members spoke to me for about 30 minutes, with an hour and a half for lunch with three graduate students.

What stuck me immediately was how non-hierarchical the faculty and student relationships seemed. I arrived just in time for Friday morning donuts, a weekly affair that gets the graduate students, faculty and staff together. A few minutes after 10am, with a chocolate old-fashion in hand, I sat down with Professor Edward Taylor. I spoke about why I wanted to go to graduate school and he showed me his work in Mexico and his computer modeling that explained rural land use after NAFTA. He was beaming, excited with his work and told me about the opportunities of doing research work in Mexico or in China through the AgEcon department. Like most visits of the day, we went over the allotted 30 minutes. I went on and visited with Professor Farzin, who shared my view that economics needed to take into account, social, political and anthropological conditions before concluding what constituded a workable policy. Prof. Farzin's experience in the World Bank, doing computer modeling, showed him that cookie-cutter solutions do not work. Prof. Chalfant's the Chair of the department and told me a bit more about the M.S. program's courses and how they differed from the PhD courses. Prof. Rozelle was next on my schedule. He's a specialist in Chinese rural economies, and we had a great time talking about how quickly political decisions in China gets translated into actions, no bureaucratic red-tape or democratic debate stands in the way of far-flung projects like the three-gorges-dam or the reforestation of Northern China. There have been many graduate students advised by Prof. Rozelle who have gone to China to do research - something I'm interested in doing.

Lunch was with Rocio, Caroline, and Hiro. Three graduate students from Spain, Canada, and Japan, respectively. They told me that the first two years of coursework was very intensive and prelims and orals were stressful and it was sometimes necessary to take them over. But the main impression I got was that they liked studying at Davis, they liked their advisors and enjoyed being TAs and research assistants.

After lunch there were more visits with Prof. Smith, Goodhue, and Boucher. Smith is an econometrician and a finance guy. He plays rugby. Prof. Rachel Goodhue, the only female faculty member I met during my visit, was the Gradate Committee Chair. Basically, she heads the committee that decides whether you get in - or not. She told me that next Wednesday would be the planned meeting to discuss applications and that she had not looked at my file prior to our meeting. She's a Berkeley grad I think, and I know some graduate students at Davis find her intimidating. She seemed like a Berkeley professor, a little more serious, a little less smiling and laughing, so in a Davis environment maybe she does come off a bit intimidating but I didn't think so. I thought, "Okay, next Wednesday. I'll call next Friday to check in." She asked me why I chose AgEcon instead of Economics. I replied that I thought AgEcon would be more applied. I could learn my modeling and theory and get on with applied research work. Plus, right now, I think I want to focus on Development Economics and AgEcon's better suited. My final visit was with Prof. Boucher. We got to talking about Brazil and Portuguese. Which led him to tell me a story of how he was invited to do research in Mozembique while in graduate school because he was learning Portuguese on a fellowship. I had all my questions answered by this point and we just chatted about what other classes should be taught in the department. Theoretical courses on incentives and contracting and asymmetric information was at the top of that list. During my visit with Prof. Boucher, Prof. Goodhue came in and asked me to see her when I was finished. So I headed up (or was it down?) to her office a bit past 3pm.

I thought perhaps I'd forgotten something in my application. She invited me in. "We had an informal meeting," she said. "And we decided to offer you a letter of acceptance, the fee remission and TA or RA-ships for the next two years."

Wow. In my dumbfoundedness I said, "You can do that?"

Prof. Rozelle's office was across the hall. He smiled, characteristically, and congratulated me and told me he was impressed.

So starting in September, you'll probably be able to find me in this building.

It's the Social Science and Humanitites Building at UC Davis. People there call it a maze and I can see why... there are doors and halls all over the place, unintuitively scattered, so bring a compass.

I've officially started my graduate education. Yes, MATH CAMP started today. Yes, math camp. It's like summer camp for the super nerdy as it has been pointed out to me. What's striking is that I feel I can do the math... I'm just bad at understanding verbalized or written math. Here's what I remember of today's lecture, paraphrasing of course:

Prof: We'll be working with the real number set which is written with a capital R. In your book, it's a bold R. Also, sometimes we write it in cursive R. Although you'll also see this (an R with two vertical lines). (this takes about two minutes)

Prof (cont'd): Vectors are written as a variable. "X". It could also be shown as X₁,X₂,...,X_n. You can think of them as vertical columns when there are operations to be done.

Prof: Additive inverse... (he means subtracting)

Prof: The inner product is also known as a dot product. Some will refer to this as a scalar product.

Prof: "None negative" is different from "strictly positive". "Strictly negative" is different from "none positive".

Prof: Lenght of x is also equal to the norm of x. People can't agree what to call it sometimes. (oh, really?!?!)

Prof: Make sure you differentiate between a function and the values or the set that represents the function; the level of utility from the utility function. As this may lead to confusion. (which leaves me confused)

For a maybe, kind of, somewhat, sort of mind I have, math can be a bit hellish. You mean close enough isn't?

On the bright side. The people seem cool. People who I had a chance to talk are from all over the place. I remember that Nebraska, UCLA, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Uruguay and Japan are all represented. Good news also came that I may be able choose between being an RA for Scott Rozelle, the China development economics guy that got me interested in coming to Davis in the first place, and TAing for microeconomics. The TA job might be a scheduling conflict with one of the classes I need to take, but I think that'll be worked out soon.

Today we had an orientation with the requisite announcements and administrative stuff. But a few things were interesting...

The UAW local 2865 paid us a visit and I signed up. I've always liked the idea of being a union worker, especially a United Auto Worker union member. Well, officially, I'm not yet a member, but if I ever decide to be a TA (possibly next year) I'd automatically become a member.

A new student from the Korean agriculture ministry (or something to that effect) asked me about U.S. agriculture and the political economy of agriculture in the U.S. I answered with something like how the 1-3% of farmers in the U.S. is a huge constituency that can push through ridiculous farm bills in both the White House and Congress. We spend a few billion here and there to buy products from farmers. We insure that they'll sell for a certain price (say $2.65/bushel for corn) and if it doesn't reach that level, the government pays growers that price anyway. What other business is like that? Oh, and the payments aren't based on the quantity of product. The government pays based on historical harvest, so even if you don't plant anything and the price of whatever you didn't plant drops, you get paid! What a deal, huh? In order to help out the developing world, we destroy their agriculture base. We spend billions to buy from U.S. farmers and give away the crops for free in starving countries. In Egypt, there are silos full of grain from local producers, but it doesn't sell since U.S. free grain is available. Aid agencies are going crazy over U.S. agriculture subsidies since it just creates a cycle of starvation in other countries. U.S. money earmarked for aid is only to be used to buy food from U.S. producers, not producers in the place of famine or drought. Well, anyway, it's going to be fun chatting with him about agriculture policies, but first I'll have to do some homework (a conservative view here).

Another interesting tidbit is that I attended the mixer from 4-6pm. It's the first time I've been a student anywhere and had alcohol catered in. So a bit of red wine, grapes and strawberries were in order. Fun stuff.

After the event, I dug up a speech I read on Brad De Long's site and forwarded it to the new grad students along with my own cautiously optimistic words.

Now, it's time for more math camp homework.

Standing: Todd, Aya, Alex, Rocio, Sonom, Jennifer, Chen-Pian, Lisa, Dorothy, Pierre, Suzan, Jennifer, Siwa, Matthew, Ricardo
Sitting: Me, Tina, Cheng-Fang, Wensi, David
Person taking photo: Aslihan

It seems I've been assigned an office already - no one's told me in person. I'll try picking up my keys tomorrow. If you look at the site, I'm office-mates with Aya, Ricardo, and Steve. Haven't met Steve, but Aya (from Tokyo but who also speaks Mandarin Chinese) and Ricardo (de Uruguay) are two very cool people.

Social Science and Humanities Building, # 1177
Tel: (530) 754-8485

The department BBQ was tonight and it was a lot of fun. The best part of this department is the interaction between all the students and the faculty. We hang out, drink beer, cook burgers, and talk endlessly.

Today, two new faces appeared. Navin Tar and Chen Guang. Tar is actually the first person I've met who has their own fan club. Everyone's amazed that he dropped pop stardom in Thailand to join us here in Davis to study agriculture and resource economics. I say it's better than becoming a fat Elvis, a white MJ, or a dead Jimmy, Janis, or Jim. Anyway, he says it's a long story... so I'll find out I guess. On a related note, Aya, my office-mate is reputedly friends with a famous chinese/japanese pop star because of some Japanese school in Taiwan connection. Is everyone a pop star?

No, but I'm starting to think everyone has a story. Dorothy's a black belt in taekwondo. Lisa just got back from a solo trip to Argentina/Patagonia. Jennifer's seen over 800 species of birds (she keeps count).

I'm at the point where I want to walk up to everyone, shake them, and ask for their story, their narrative on how they fit into the world. In the process maybe I'll find out mine.

Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs and Steel fame came to give a talk at UC Davis today. Scott Rozelle teaches the book to his development economics class, so he organized a bunch of us to attend the talk. It was held at the medical building all the way across campus, past the fields, cows, walnut trees, and dirt plazas. The 4pm sun made us sweat where our back, shirt, and backpack meet.

The room was crowded with people sitting on tables and standing where they could. We sat on the shiny smooth concrete steps bordering the lecture hall. It was probably double the stipulated capacity that make fire marshalls comfortable.

Diamond's talk was on the sudden decline of societies from environmental degradation, with a focus on Easter Island. Easter Island being the extreme case of deforestation and environmental suicide. They chopped down all the trees on the island and killed off all the land birds and most of the sea bird species to the point where the subtropical island became desolate. No more canoes to hunt porpoises and no more wood to erect monster stone statues. His aim was apparently to get us to find the analogue in our own world; our ongoing process of depleting the rainforest and our fisheries and closer to home, the salinazation of Central Valley soil (why the fertile crescent is no longer fertile served as the warning).

His talk was good, but was like dialup. I need the broadband, you $5000-a-lecture-bum. Where are the pictures? Where are the stories of Papua New Guinea? When are you going to get up and dance?

I think reading his book is much more exciting and immersing than his talk - but it's still worthwhile to do either.

Your assignment should you choose to accept it... TA for ARE 100A at 8am MWF with your buddy Tar as the other TA, the one who will know how to answer the questions that finds you reeling.

8am! That means up by 7am.

Before the rooster crows.

Before the paper gets delivered.

Before my body filters out prior night's excess.

Just as I'm getting into REM sleep.

Just as the light from yonder window stream.

Just as I curse aloud to the ringing digital metronome of labor's song.