Economist

Project 365 #52: Monday, 6th April 2009

During our Law of Investment lecture, with one my favourite lecturers Ms. Gomathy.

Me and Khai Shin.

Was feeling sick the entire day, and at night, went to my French class as usual via the RM1 toll way through the Subang Airport route as opposed to the RM2.60 toll before on another route – exploring and testing out new routes via GPS is fun.

On the way back, after my class ended later than usual at about 10.45pm, surprisingly, instead of displaying the usual route home, my GPS showed me another so I decided to try it out – it turned out to be a longer route and I took 10 minutes later than usual to reach home, but heck at least I tried something refreshingly new and know better now.

Project 365 #53: Tuesday, 7th April 2009

After eating my breakfast in the morning, I entered my bathroom to shower and that’s when I heard an ugly whining noise right next to my window on the rooftop – after listening to the repeated whines, I deduced they were coming from two cats who were probably squabbling and fighting with each other as I heard plenty of aggressive movements on our roof’s tiles.

They literally looked as if they were caught red-handed doing something bad lmao. Not too long after I snapped a few more shots, the white and brown cat turned and move away and the black cat followed suit, presumably bringing their argument to somewhere else where a pesky human with his DSLR wouldn’t be able to spy on them.

I’ve also had a well-spent long break today as there was a career fair in my college. After visiting several booths, we went for lunch at the ex-Success restaurant (since I don’t know its new name) at SS15, then came back, and both Rebecca and I visited EON Bank’s booth, where we talked to Marco and Leon from the HR department (our conversation began, IIRC, with us mentioning about the European study tour for some reason), the latter whom we found out was just a year older than me, a banana, used to study at Sri KL, studied Psychology at HELP before studying in UK for 2 years, graduated last year and had already worked for EON Bank for a year.. impressive achievements.

It was interesting when we engage in a lively banter with the both of them – it wasn’t so much of a sales pitch or anything of that sort, or speeches on why their bank is better than the rest, etc, rather, it was like a friendly conversation between you and a fellow traveller you met while on the road, and we talked for a fair bit, though of course we did discuss employment at EON Bank and their management trainee programme (MAT, forgot what the A stands for). Marco told us that he’s always interested to talk to students to gain better insights of our points of view (considering that he was at least a decade older) and he explained that was why he kept asking us questions about our college etc, but I thought I learned a lot from them instead too. We were also let on an ‘insider’ news that EON Bank will change its name by maybe end of this year which was also why they were wearing an orange uniform rather than blue as that colour was too Malay-ish or something.

EON Bank’s booth on the left, with Leon (in orange) seated next to an unidentified female (presumably his other colleague).

What is of interest was when both Marco and Leon told us that they are now shifting their concentration from public university graduates to private university/college graduates – apparently most of their public uni graduates have atrocious English, and Marco commented that he once had to correct one graduate’s simple grammar like past tense, present continuous (-ing), etc wtf. Despite this generalisation, I thought it was interesting to note a fairly prominent bank’s HR employees’ opinions on this.

Working in the HR department sounds interesting too when I asked Leon what his job entails exactly.

Also, apparently Kenneth would be going on the European study tour to get his two credits as he prefers to graduate early (thus not going to Melbourne anymore), though I thought it wasn’t a good idea to graduate so early in a global environment of a worsening economy, which Marco told us a similar thing too. Was a bit sad that my roommate-to-be is no more. :( Ho Sheng mentioned that he wouldn’t be going too. *crosses fingers WTF

Said ex-roommate-to-be sleeping through the entire IFP lecture wtf.

Project 365 #54: Wednesday, 8th April 2009

Our Macro2 lecturer was fairly pissed at us for not doing her tutorials, and for the first time ever, made real her threats that she wasn’t gonna give us answers if we didn’t do her work. She did return our test papers and I was pleasantly surprised to get 16/20 although I certainly thought I could’ve done better if I wasn’t doing incredibly last minute revision.

Khai Shin sleeps in a most fascinating manner while we were at the Resource Centre – I was nerding away revising Macro2 for both our upcoming test and tutorial.

I was feeling incredibly refreshed and alert the entire day for the first time, although I did take several catnaps throughout the day. I don’t know if it’s me finally getting used to classes from 8am till 6pm+ or something.. but I guess it was partially that plus me sleeping slightly earlier than usual the night before at about 1am – early by my standards anyway.

Marco added me too on FB, though I’m curious how he managed to find it armed with only the knowledge of my first name after both he and Leon tossed jokes about my name wtf.

A coursemate of mine, Kim San, asked me about sharing a house/room together in Melbourne, so looks like I’m not turning into an anti-social loner there after all.

---

Also as of late I found that my interest in economics has been renewed – I’ve been reading The Economist online and found its articles refreshingly new and interesting, thanks to the recommendation from our Macro2 and IME’s visiting lecturer Greg Maynes. And yesterday I finally discovered yesterday what Greg told us before – Economist’s online Debate section which was laid out systematically and professionally in that it lists an introduction from the moderator, and both the opinions of the proponent and the opponent of the subject matter.

And they’re all very, very interesting topics of which I’ve always wondered what professionals really thought on the subject matter for both sides of the fence – both held very interesting and convincing arguments that I honestly don’t know who to root for sometimes. Example topics include whether the rich should pay higher taxes; the statement that we’re all Keynesians now (both of which I’ve read thoroughly); individuals, and not the state, should pay for higher education; it would be a mistake to regulate the financial system heavily after the crisis; the list goes on.

Aren’t they all interesting debate topics! If you’re an economics student (specifically pointing this out to Suet and Heng wtf) or know a little about economics, you guys should read them or even join in the online debates by commenting (as Greg has encouraged us). The only thing I’ve ever contributed was a comment for an article ‘Notes from the underground, How to measure the black market’, rebutting this guy’s silly opinion:

hommer_simpson wrote:
April 7, 2009 14:46

Why does the picture depict a few clearly middle eastern looking men with some Dinnar currency trading, and yet talks of Greece, Italy, USA and other such countries? Is it a case of prejustice at this paper? Shame on you the Economist if that is what it was ment.

Saigoheiki wrote:
April 7, 2009 16:38

hommer_simpson: Shame on you for reading too much into a single image used to merely illustrate the topic of the article.

I’m quite pleased to see that my comment has 2 recommendations from other readers wtf (works in the way ala fmylife.com, whereby you can click on “I agree, your life is f**ked” or “you deserved that one” and it’ll tally the amount of ‘votes’ hahaha).

Nerd out, gonna catch American History X now.