Those in literature, biology and other areas are often surprised that we econ students spend two years on courses and exams like elementary school students. To some students like me, the first two years are actually easier. People even created a terminology to describe our anxiety after the two years, that is, ‘the third-year syndrome’. After the courses and exams, everyone stops and looks around to find some topics to work on. The start is usually difficult. Sometimes I admire those who work in labs as they always have some tasks to do. It might be physically tiring, but may not be so annoying as busy doing nothing.

My third-year syndrome comes a bit earlier as I have cleared the course requirement now. I am a bit confused whether I should sit down and focus on a specific question.

Talked to Torsten about my confusion today. He insightfully (as always) pointed out that taking courses is a therapy to avoid the hard part: research. I have started two term papers and basically have been stuck in the middle. So I should seriously think of a topic while taking a few courses as therapy. He also comforts me that every good researcher wrote bad papers when they just started their career.

Got the Development Economics II exam result and it is not bad. But besides the third-year syndrome, I might also suffer from 'Chinese-student curse' (defined by Ruixue, i.e. me...), which refers to the fact that Chinese students often perform better in exams than in research. I often know what will come in the exams unconsciously. I knew the answers of the questions without listening to the dialogues when I did TOEFL despite my bad oral English.

As one of a large population who benefited and suffered from the Chinese educational system, I am grateful yet worried. On one hand, exams provide incentives to study some materials. What's more important, they provide opportunities to people like me without any strong background to get college education. On the other hand, we are trained from the beginning to replicate others and tend to get lost once we are free to create anything. This might not be a threat in traditional China when talents were equal to talents in literature. Memorizing classical works will be helpful for writing poems. I have no intention to depreciate the creativity of poetry-writing. Even Mr Alfred Nobel hoped to be a poet rather than a scientist. (You can buy his poetry book in the Nobel Museum. Sorry for the quality of the poems). The online poem machine may help to illustrate my point.

However, in terms of social science (perhaps apart from law. Chinese are the best candidates to study law, according to Yi Shu) and science (economics is thought to be quasi-science, at least by overconfident economists), no one should earn respects because he or she can repeat what is known. I blushed myself thinking that I was once praised for my recitation of Pi.

You know, Pi=3.14159265358979323846…