As a senior, this semester I have SO much more academic freedom to take whatever classes I want than ever before...and that's saying a lot, because with Hopkins, "no core curriculum" basically means that you take whatever you want starting from your first semester. You just fulfill the requirements for your major and then take some "distribution requirements" outside of your major.
So this semester, I'm only taking two classes that are for my majors (cognitive science & sociology): Computer Fluency (for cog sci) and Education Politics in Urban America (for soc). I'm also doing research in cog sci and a senior thesis in soc...but by far, my FAVORITE class is Behavioral Finance: The Psychology of Decision Making. The class is taught out of the Psych department but is really a mix of psych, econ, and random pop culture facts.
My professor is actually a practicing private psychologist, but he also lectures @ Hopkins for one class each semester (in the spring, he does Law & Psychology, which I am definitely going to take). He's also got a law degree. The cool thing about that is that he has all this real-world experience that he can share and use to illustrate examples in class. He never lectures from the readings, instead he asks us questions based on theoretical examples of the concepts...it's a lot like what I imagine law school will be like.
Today we learned about why professional football teams seem to always try to kick a field goal when in 4th & short/1/2ish situations instead of going for it. Turns out that they suffer from something called "probability neglect." In other words, despite the fact that, when a UC-Berkeley professor studied a ton of past 4th & short situations he found that it's woefully more likely that you'd make it than if you tried a field goal, most coaches choose to go for the kick. They think that the risk of missing the 4th down and losing possession is just too great...and they forget about the fact that the probability would lead them to decide otherwise. (As a side note, professional sports commentators now seem to agree.)
I *heart* this class...for two and a half hours each Tuesday, I get totally sucked into the world of investing, personality differences, and risk-seeking vs. risk-averse portfolio analysis. I love that what we're learning could be totally applicable to our lives later on...and that our professor is quick to point out that even he doesn't always follow the advice he teaches us (in other words, he's subject to the same flaws as the rest of the "irrational" investors we talk about in class). However, he definitely hasn't asked the players in our class to see whether the Hopkins football team follows the "rational" advice....
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