Two days of exams at LSE

Monday - History of Science

With Emma having gone back to Cambridge yesterday afternoon, this morning's trip to London is more relaxing than it might otherwise have been. A few mixed motives though. I have to make sure I am down in plenty of time, yet I don't want to wander around outside if I am early as my hayfever is pretty bad at the moment. But also I don't want to be in the LSE library, which would be filled with stressed students.

So I have a cooked breakfast at an Italian cafe at Holborn around 10:30, then have a look in the LSE bookshop picking up one or two remaindered books and having a good look through the financial market books (Patterson's The Quants is out in paperback I note). Then to the Philosophy Dept MSc students room where I can stretch out across several chairs and doze. Others have had the same idea and a couple of the other H of S students are already there. We discuss which questions we are best prepared for and one or two technical questions are passed around (mainly from the Italian girl on the course). Time passes and eventually we wonder round to the NAB together.

In the end, this exam is as easy as I had expected. Most of the questions are from past exam papers and were ones that I had well-defined views on. The role of physics in Kepler's thought, Galileo's telescope observations and the relation between Kepler, Galileo and Newton. If these three questions hadn't been available, I could have done just as well with three of the others I reckon. So pretty good for me.

We have a quick drink in The George afterwards. Others had found the paper more mixed. The guy who wanted a really good Bacon question got a moderate one. The Italian girl who wanted something on the Middle Ages didn't get this at all.

My hotel was in Bedford Place near Russell Square; one of the Lastminute.com "Secret" hotels. Turned out it was the Beauchamp, one of the many converted Bloomsbury town houses. Not at all bad for £100 (versus its regular price of over £200). Raining quite hard this evening and I only go out briefly for some fresh air and a walk. Then back for a long bath and some room-service dining.

Probably asleep by 9:30

Tuesday - Philosophy of Economics

Awake at 4:30 as usual with the plan of spending the morning at the hotel doing some final revision. Usually I think this is a bad idea but I know so little P of E that I felt I had to try and get at least one more topic from Part B in my mind better. A brief break for a walk down past the British Museum for breakfast. I stayed at the hotel till asked to leave around 12:00.

Lots of P of E students in the Dept room when I got there - who even remembered me from the two classes I attended last year. The exuberant Chinese girl is fretting about this exam, while the cool Dutch guy seems very relaxed. We talk a bit but most people are really keeping their final thoughts to themselves.

So did my strategy work? Did spending just two weeks on the course work result in an exam disaster? Remarkably, the answer is no! Indeed my plan of focusing on some models from financial economics that I knew really well paid dividends as I was able to use each in the Part A questions that I did. But what of the dreaded Part B, where I knew virtually nothing (especially in regards to the technical game theory stuff)? Well I got lucky again, with a question on the "Folk Theorem" about which I had around two-thirds of a good answer.

Combined with a strong Part A, I actually think I did quite well - much to my surprise

I had wondered what I might want to do when the exams were over. In the end, I had a brief walk back through LSE (which I might not see again for a good while) and then took the tube to Marble Arch and went straight home. The only mark of my exams finishing was the purchase of a Chicken Tikka Masala meal from the M&S petrol station on the way home.

Tomorrow I start on the big clean up of the study and then think about starting trading again from next week.