Personal Experiences and Reflections at University of Washington
This article aims to share my (academic) experiences at University of Washington, Seattle during the autumn quarter 2014. For 1st year PhD students in the Economics department, it is typical that almost all our efforts are invested in taking core courses and preparing for the qualifying exams. In other words, it’s good to have a research agenda, but students are encouraged to fully concentrate on core courses and exams. Therefore, I will take this opportunity to share my personal experiences and reflections, and will not discuss my research in this article. The first thing that required a period of adjustment was food. Unlike Taiwan, the cost of living in Seattle is high, giving funded students such as myself, who typically try to make the best use of their stipends, greater incentives to cook by ourselves instead of eating outside. However, cooking for oneself also takes a lot of time and, for a Ph.D. student, time constraints are an important issue. To avoid cooking every meal, thus crowding out my time to study and spending an unreasonable amount of money, I finally decided to cook about once or twice a week and portion out the food
