So I received my finals results just a few days ago. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how things turned out, even though (like always) I could've done better. I had been pretty lazy this semester, aka my last semester in my 3-year Bachelor's programme. Maybe it's because I had instant access to my computer, while in America I had to walk 20 minutes to the nearest internet cafe for a game of Dota. I really don't know. But overall things had gone okay, I suppose. GPA-wise, I landed myself something like a 3.75 (by American standards) to round off my degree, which is slightly better than an A- average. Here in New Zealand, they hand out quite a few A+ grades (apparently that means 'exceptional work' or something) when in America the A+ is extremely rare. So my grades might actually be a bit inflated.

There are times when I ask myself why I care so much about my GPA. Why I labour so much over something that's only worth 5 percent, when I would turn up to a lecture even if it meant losing out on going to a concert, etc. To an extent, the GPA is just like an arbitrary number, like your salary, or your MMR. Those numbers are important to an extent (a C gets you a degree, 60,000 gets you a comfortable life, 4K MMR puts you in the top 1%, and so forth), but after a while, it becomes a matter of chasing after those numbers for the sake of it. I just want to do as well as I can in my work, just to see how far I can go, in the same way some people just want to earn as much as possible. My dad once told me that earning money is addictive. If you earned a six-digit sum in one year, you are not going to stop on the next. I think the same kind of applies to GPA as well.

Well, things didn't go quite as planned, but at least I could breathe a sigh of relief. I was very stressed before and during the busy exams/essay deadline season, and I was very very afraid of doing badly. More specifically, it was about an economics paper I took. I took this paper because I did pretty well in a political economy course and I wanted to see what economics 'really' looked like. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Since most of the work I did were in the areas of political science/sociology, the way economics presented its methodology and explanation for social behaviour was completely different to what I'd been exposed to in my education so far. And so I struggled quite a bit early in the semester. I always joked that the only thing I learnt was that I could now draw a supply curve and remember that it actually slopes up, not down.

Still, I don't regret it at all. I think that part of the challenge of being a student is learning to look at things from radically different perspectives. Every discipline, when faced with a common problem, produces its own explanations. So in international relations, for example, we might look for theories such as institutionalism in order to explain why nation-states behave in certain ways, why China treats Senkaku Island so seriously even though it lacks strategic value, etc. A sociologist might look towards class and identity to explain why xenophobia is such a prevalent issue in China-Japan relations. And an economist might pull out game theory to explain security dilemmas in East Asia. The last one is particularly interesting because I think game theory has a lot of explanatory value. It has a lot of utility in analysing decision-making and why people do things, without resorting every time to history ("X happened because previous events in history culminated in X'). 

The real problem that makes students like me reluctant to look at those varying approaches, is that different disciplines in the university tend to ignore each other. So the sociology student doesn't really think about how economics might explain their course material even better, while economics student might treats sociology as all gibberish (meanwhile, the computer science guy treats them as  idiots who wasted three years on an useless piece of paper). When I was in America, I asked one of my instructors about how important my major is to my future development. He said that you should never let what you learn in university dictate how you think. You just need to be really smart. I think he's really quite right. If there's one thing I really learnt at university, it's that you should just read and learn whatever is necessary to explain what is at hand.

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A professor from my one of my courses sent me an e-mail the other day. It turns out she actually remembered me from our office hours earlier in the semester, when I told her that I had plans for finishing off my Bachelor's degree with Honours. Basically, she wanted me to keep studying because apparently I'm such a good student and etcetera and that the additional degree will make my qualifications look a bit more competitive on the job market. An additional year at university sounds okay, I suppose, but what I really want is to start working, even if it means starting off with an average entry-level job and working from the ground up. Anyway, it seems I'll be staying at the university for one more year, and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write for my dissertation. A lot of big organizations like to see writing samples, so to write my dissertation on where I most likely would work sounds like a pretty good idea.

Well, I guess the paper I wrote for her class was pretty good. I'm actually very proud of it, because it was a conscious attempt to make my language as precise and technical as possible (to make the 'science' in 'social science' pop out, so to speak), and for once things actually went as planned. I wrote my paper on comparative environmental policies between China and New Zealand, and ask whether a participatory democratic system lends to more effective governance over the environment. Writing the paper was a very challenging experience. It's always hard to settle on the right variables to test out your hypothesis in a social science paper, because you have to balance generalization with explanatory power. It is always important to simplify and exaggerate, making sure that you quantify the most important variables that shapes the phenomena you are trying to explain, be precise about your definitions, and not to mix up 'believe', 'prove' and 'argue'.

What I've realized is that precision and clarity is the most important thing when it comes to writing any paper, and to keep an argument as streamlined and clear as possible is necessary in keeping a social science paper respectable (and living up to the 'science' in its name). On this topic: something I've thought about for quite a while is whether social sciences, given enough time, will explain social phenomena in the same way as the natural sciences explain the natural world. Or whether the two are so fundamentally different that it would be a mistake for social science to see itself as a purely empirical endeavour. I had been thinking about this when I was writing my research paper, and wondering why all the source material I studied used prose nearly identical to that of a scientific report. And I don't have an answer, just yet, although fortunately I don't have a deadline to figure out an answer for that problem.