August 28, 2005, 3:05pm

It's only the first week of the semester and I already have two assignments due next week. Not to mention about the reading. And for the courses I've taken, I will have four exams for each. (I miss my time at LSE when there's only the final exam in May... Sophia and Carmen, what do you prefer?)

There will also be two papers or other assignments before the end of the semester. (Candace, you said Florida is not a place to study! It's for vacation!!! Now, I can only think of studying and no vacation at all...)

So, I have been working on the statistics. At the very beginning of the lecture, Prof. Algina began with the mean and standard deviation... I was thinking, am I going to do these again?

Just like when I was at LSE, they taught the theories of t-test, regression, cluster analysis and factor analysis. And I only had very limited applicatoin to use SPSS.

But then, Prof. Algina moved quickly to inference, confidence interval... Fisher's Z transformation and SAS... So, I will learn SAS in this course, for which I'm an idiot.

How exciting! Mean in the beginning then SAS programming in the end!!! I only saw the SAS screen when I was in HKU but I have never learnt to use it. So, I'll have to work very hard and learn more. It costs a lot to learn a little thing.

Actually I need to establish my tuition fee waiver but my department has a problem to do that. I just happened to see the deadline to pay fees next week and if I didn't ask about the waiver at the International Center... probably no one is going to tell me until I'm caught of not paying fees. I didn't even know that my department has not yet input my waiver status in the system. Come on, it's on my appointment letter dated in March. Why didn't they tell me their problem in the first place?

So, the solution is, to go to the Financial Services again tomorrow by 3:30pm. (They close at 3:30pm... and I was there at 4:30pm last Friday.) Money places are strange places. Why do they close earlier than other places?

BTW, I got the letter from the Social Security Administration yesterday, that I'll get my card in two weeks. Good news finally. I need the SSN to get through my payroll... Oh, stipend... $$$...

But you see, I applied for SSN for nearly a month already. If they're efficient, what have they done to check on me?