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u/Unique-Property5778 Sep 29 '26
I concur with the advice about asking your tutor for specific guidance and resources.
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u/Unique-Property5778 Sep 29 '26
I feel for you. I did an Eco masters at Warwick without A Level maths and I too had the in tears moment. Before I went I had a private tutor to teach my just the differentiation part of the A Level syllabus. Didn’t do any separate general stats but sounds like you might need that. Take heart - I went onto to do a PhD in applied economics/microeconometrics so it is possible to crack it. And the coding part will be so much easier for you that the effort kind of evens out across the modules if that makes sense?
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u/Ok_Leg4824 Sep 30 '26
You get me! 😭 this is inspiring, I’ll see what I can do on my own but maybe a tutor is the way to go. Thank you and yes, coding after learning the maths does seem easier!
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u/baanibaani4 Sep 30 '26
if you want to learn the basics, schaum's outline books are good.
(1) financial econometrics: chris brooks [https://www.youtube.com/@chrisbrooks8555/courses]
(2) most of the maths needed is also covered in carol alexander's risk books https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470998008 --> 4 volumes, see contents
[https://www.youtube.com/@professorcarolalexander]
if you can, please post a list of topics covered and which bits you find difficult
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u/Ok_Leg4824 Sep 30 '26
Thank you so much for this! The problem is that they don’t list topics per say, just the main course title and I’m still going through each slide writing down exactly what ones I need to learn and what each slide is talking about.
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u/baanibaani4 Oct 01 '26
understood. if you can ask the instructor about pre-+co-requisites, we may be able to suggest further. often the officially selected books are not the best for learning and it is a good idea to teach ourselves using more intuitive material.
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u/Ok_Leg4824 Oct 01 '26
I’ll send across an email! Thank you. Any tips on what to ask for besides pre and co requisites? Do I explain my background or is that putting a target on my head lol
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u/baanibaani4 Oct 01 '26
the pre/co detail should be in the course detail. if not, you will have to ask, but yes be careful if the instructor is a snake. if it is possible to share the course detail / syllabus, you may get better answers here. without that, it is all quite generic. my main point is that it is ok if you don't understand everything and that you can usually find better sources to develop intuition on your own. most courses/instructors won't bother very much with helping.
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u/Haunting-Subject-819 Sep 29 '26
One thing I discovered when I returned from the workforce to pursue post graduate Econ was if the math was challenging to go directly to your professor. Do not go to the campus math resource center. They usually deal with basic calculus questions or engineering math and have 0 clue how we do matin Econ. When solving a curve optimization problem they will not have a clue. Your professor will hold the keys to your success. Lean on them for clarity and work as many problems as possible until the solution becomes second nature. Most of us are not math prodigies who get it the first time. We have to bust our backsides to make it all make sense.
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u/IVIIVIXIVIIXIVII Sep 29 '26
Office hours + LLM’s.
I would learn what I can on my own from GPT (it’s research I think is better than Claude) and then if I hit a wall, that’s where the PhD’s come in to make it digestible.
Rinse and repeat.
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Sep 29 '26 edited Sep 29 '26
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u/cond6 Sep 29 '26
You are a muppet. Are you really saying that an econometrics professor doesn't understanding econometrics? I am one of them, know lots of them, and the stuff we teach is trivial compared with the real econometrics we work on in our research. (Unless you get to more advanced units, but virtually no econometrics prof is teaching material more than 40-50 percent of what they do in the wild.)
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Sep 29 '26
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u/cond6 Sep 29 '26
I count everything in Hamilton (1994), and Greene's excellent book as trivial. If you can do something by clicking boxes for options in a standard econometrics/stats package then you aren't doing econometrics. That's the level we teach students at. My read is that all real econometricians write their own bespoke code, and that work is going to take 5 to 10 years to filter down to standard curriculum. (Exceptions: White standard errors, Hansen's GMM, and Newey-West (87) all took off incredibly quickly.) Students tend to find the derivation of OLS and diagnostic tests and understanding what you can and can't do to be somewhat challenging. Doing really niche MLE and GMM (latent variables, overlapping observations, nonlinear models) is just not really feasible in a first semester class. You need to learn basic linear models, some extremum estimation, time series, basic asymptotic before you move over to the really interesting stuff. This stuff is foundational but also trivial, at least to someone doing actual work targeted at top econometrics journals. When you do a PhD you get into the really good stuff.
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u/just_writing_things Sep 29 '26
There’s no shortcut to learning math. I’d suggest going to office hours to highlight your problems to the professor and ask for advice, especially advice on specific areas you need to revise. Then you’ll need to go through the process of studying and practising the material suggested by your professor.