If you are Dutch and active on YouTube, you might have come across a video from Joardy Film. This youtuber makes videos as his alter ego Joardy (who is dry as a bone) and one of my favorite videos is the one where he is asked “waar moet jij van Huilon?” (what makes you cri, spelling mistake intended). The list that follows goes on and on and on… “sad dog videos, dog outside the house, waiting longer than 7 minutes, people that fart in public, tall people on the bike in a hurry.” Really, it’s so much funnier when you watch it, so check it out.
Anyway, this video brightened up my life during Quantitative Methods for Logistics and as I felt rather frustrated at times… It made me wonder, what makes econometricians cri evertim?
Programming…
Index out of bound warnings, file not found errors, null pointer exception, errors in general actually. Printing in Java, object-oriented programming, reading in and printing to Excel using Apache (still don’t understand it). Spending more time on debugging than building your actual program. Switching between programming languages, stupid interpunction. Code of more than 1000 lines. Dividing by an integer and searching for 5 hours to find that mistake. Commenting your code, or not commenting your code and not understanding anything of it after a while. Classes with stupid names that are too embarrassing to hand in (“Hate_thesis2.java”), running on 12 university pcs at a time, worse: when others run on 12 university pcs at a time. “Model running” PowerPoints, running over night and waking up to see your optimality gap is still 10%. Casting because your types are not correct. Cplex.
Assignments…
QML assignments, unclear assignment descriptions, extra work for bonuses, title pages you need to print, sign and scan again. Making tables in Latex, Latex Compile Errors, aligning equations. Scientific econometric papers of which you only understand the introduction. APA notation, the book “Academic Writing Skills for Economics and Business Administration” by Bas Karremans. Deadlines on Sunday evening (bye bye weekend), free riders, team work, group assignments with more than 2 people and google drives with 100 subfolders. Introductory Seminar Case Studies, Seminar Case Studies in Logistics, Master Seminar Case studies… ALL CASE STUDIES, but even worse: THE THESIS.
The study…
BSA of 100%, teachers telling you that the person next to you will not be there by the end of the year. Introduction to statistics, carrying the “Big Heij” to uni. Fellow students that give you hints but actually do not help you at all. Studying while your friends drink beer. Having to go to lectures because you will not understand anything if you don’t. Bonus questions that are actually homework exercises (and you cannot answer them because you did not make all 130 homework questions again twice while studying for the exam). That people believe you will become a millionaire, whereas you highly doubt you will make the end of the year. Mathematical proofs, exercises without a solution manual, not finding your answer on Stack Overflow, and of course: Bayesian statistics.
In short, econometrics in general. “Ja? Okaaay” (Joardy Film, 2016)
And APA of course: Joardy Film. “Huilon.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 Mar. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Yk0wrzqrk&frags=pl%2Cwn.
This article was written by Myrthe van den Reek, a guest writer. Here’s a little bit about her:
Hey there! I am Myrthe, a full-time econometrics student with a specialization in Logistics. To cancel out the numbers a bit I love to travel and write about what I notice around me, for instance, the life of an econometrician.
If you’re interested in writing an article for Estimator too, don’t hesitate to email us at estimator@faector.nl :)