This week was not too eventful, but I got the chance to explore Sydney and got to visit a very cool jazz themed pub. It was the final week for the first block of classes so I spent a lot of my time preparing for my final, working on a group project and writing a paper.
I got the opportunity to take two four week classes; Financial Decision Modeling and Aussie Life and Culture. In the Financial Decision Modeling class, we learned about the basics of finance and how to apply equations to help make decisions. Furthermore we got to learn how to use Microsoft Excel and had personal projects that required us to use a dataset in Excel. Despite being a Business Analytics major, I have tried to stay away from Excel because I thought it was bloated and complicated. In just these short four weeks, I have found a new appreciation for Excel and will look forward to using it in the future. For my personal project I was given a dataset on global land temperature from 1750-2013 for a bunch of different countries. The dataset included a metric for the uncertainty of the temperature and, I decided to perform both a linear regression and weight linear regression hypothesis test to determine if my data was statistically significant. I found that even with high levels of uncertainty in earlier years (mainly dates before 1850) that the data was statistically significant and in some cases, trends were skewed because of the uncertainty (i.e. they showed decreasing temperatures but my weight regression proved otherwise).
Aussie Life and Culture was a great class because it taught me a lot of Australian history that I would not have known otherwise. I got the opportunity to write my final paper on the history of immigration policies in Australia. This paper required me to do extensive research that helped me better understand their government and how Australian identity has changed over the past century. At the start of the 20th century, Australia formed its first federal government. What is now known as the “White Australian” policies, was a group of laws that aimed to keep Australia British. These policies were blatantly discriminatory and were successful in keeping non-British immigrants out of the country for over 50 years. It was not until 1975 that the country’s first human rights policy was introduced. Following this, the country began its move toward acknowledging their past aggressions and began to change for the better. Policies were introduced to open up their borders to all immigrants and the government acknowledged they had stolen the land from the aboriginal natives. This was a huge step forward for Australia and although there is still conflict, major steps have been made to undo and correct “White Australian” policies.
Over the weekend, I visited the Caterpillar Club. The bar is known to have one of the largest vinyl collections in the world, and all of their music is played from a turntable. The bar plays a lot of jazz music and has a 1920s vibe to it. There was a huge line to get into the bar, but it was worth the wait. They had a lot of themed drinks and my favorite was one in which they squeezed apples to make fresh apple juice.
