ECON 191 (Ryan Edwards, Spring 2021) and Stat 20

This is the only class I still remember lessons from and a few from Stat 20.

For some background, Spring 2021 was my first semester in UC Berkeley after transferring. I had never taken any upper-division economic courses prior to this. For my other two courses, Econ 100 B (Macroeconomics) and Stat 20, I was going to tutoring. I still remember going to my first class. It was a discussion section for Econ 100 B. I came to school late due to military training so I missed the first two weeks of semester. In that section, I did not understand a single thing the instructor taught us. I saw a lot of formulas and greek letters in an economic course and I didn't understand any of them. That was the first time I truly felt like an idiot and I should drop out of the university. Thankfully, I started going to tutoring and that saved my grades. For Stat 20, I coded for the first time. I coded for R and it was a beginner course. I had a lot of fun coding out graphs from datasets alongside interpreting what our findings meant.

Econ 191 was not a beginner course. It was the opposite infact. It is usually the last class Economics student take before graduating. Before Econ 191, you were supposed to learn and master upper division economics alongside econometrics which teaches you how to use R or Stata to do your own regression analysis with available data. I did not do any of that and for the first half of the semester, I just procrastinated. Even if I did go to class, I barely understood a thing that was being taught. In the last 5 weeks of class, I started working on my research project. I used the FBI database because they had a lot of good data on all the states for various crimes. Then I chose a topic which was the effect of drug usage on crime rates by cities depending on various drugs.

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