Never thought I’d say this, but I wish were in school right now, Duke or LSE. Not that I don’t enjoy staying home and relaxing, but seriously, five months of summer? That’s just a bit too long. Compared to this, I think I will actually welcome the two months next summer. Summers are meant to be spent exploring new places, hanging out with old friends, and engaging in fun and exciting things. But I have done all these in the first three months of summer and I’m ready to move on and return to the world of academia. As shocking as it might sound, I miss the intellectual challenges and, dare I say, the pressure? There is something called “too relaxing” afterall. Maybe it’s just me, but I need deadlines, I need assignments. LSAT practices don’t count. I need something more immediate than a standardized test that won’t come for another year (perhaps a good thing?). 

Meanwhile, I hang on to every email coming from LSE, every little piece of news indicating what is waiting for me across the Atlantic. I have just looked through the finalized editions of the course choices and thoroughly stalked each professor. I’m excited 🙂 They all seem very intelligent, of course. There are the usual impressive CV’s loaded with names like Harvard and UPenn, and there’s also a Chinese professor from Sichuan. Looking through my economic courses and these professors’ (or rather, lecturers) research papers, I’m reminded once again of why I was interested in the field in the first place. Not that I don’t appreciate what I have learned (and partially forgotten) in 55 – 110, but the fundamentals were never meant to be exciting. No one would argue their importance, but the whole point of going through all the torture is so that one day I can apply them to far more interesting problems and discovering new concepts. The goal is to find something that I will have enough interests in to write a senior thesis on. We’ll see how that goes.

On another note, I have fallen in love with Gone With The Wind all over again. I still remember watching the movie for the very first time almost ten years ago and how dazzled I was by the sheer beauty of it. But after a decade, I have suddenly discovered how much the story mirrors my life, and how the characters compare to people I know. Of course, there’s no war, no poverty, and no death, and hopefully…not the realizations that come all too late.