In the past, I never gave much thought to macroeconomics. The economy as a whole never seemed to affect my life much, or at least, I had not noticed. This, being my first economics course, has opened my eyes to each integral piece of the economy and how it interconnects. While advanced economics principles still remain foreign to me, I am now able to read a news article and infer what economic principles are being applied to our economy. This should be a course for all incoming high school freshmen to take, and take again later in their high school career. The society needs to understand how economies around the world work, so that we can have a broader range of people educated about the issues that play into politics and effectively choose leadership.

The principles I have learned in this economics course that I can apply into our home economy are incredibly valuable. In discussion with my spouse, who encouraged me to take this course due to her love of economics, we have created plans to expand our buying power during strong markets, and expand our savings and investments in weak markets. We have decided to reap the benefits of a strong economy through better wages and cash savings in order to reap the benefits of a weak market through inexpensive investments such as real estate. This will be an enormous asset to us to invest at a low level, and follow the market to a peak to receive the highest return on investment. We have also learned to diversify our career options and ourselves. My spouse works in real estate and construction, which is highly tied to the economy and can fluctuate at any time. The highs are very high, and the lows are very low. I have chosen to go into a more steady and stable position in the sciences, where we can have a stable income regardless of the market – in a perfect scenario, of course. We intend to live off of my future income, and save the surges of income in my spouse’s field, to provide for a rainy day in her market.

While I am grateful for my newfound interest in economics, I did struggle with some concepts. I enjoyed applying formulas to scenarios, however, those scenarios generally did not have a “2+2=4” answer, and it became difficult for me.  While there are laws that generally do not flex, the math part of economics was a struggle for me, in that sometimes what seemed to be the right answer to a problem was not always right. Some of the time, the answers to a question were not always the single right answer. There were multiple right answers just some more complex! I struggled with a bit of the graphing as well. After really grappling with wrong answers on quizzes, I feel that I have grasped most of the concepts on the graphs, especially in terms of reading graphs. I continue to struggle with creation of graphs and point plotting, but I may be coming to incorrect conclusions on some of the math problems.
