The day I have been waiting for is finally over! I lived through my oral exams yesterday (and passed)!!! In order to graduate with a masters in economics, our department requires that each student pass an oral exam. The entire hour-long process feels like one of those big awkward silences that follow the “your daughter is sooo adorable” comment to the mother of a 1yr old boy (he was wearing a bracelet).

As I stood up at the chalkboard for an entire hour while I explained probability distributions and the law of large numbers, here are some of the neurotic thoughts that flooded my head:

“I hope these pants don’t make my butt look like this chalkboard - but more than that, I hope no one is paying attention to either one.”

“His eyes have been closed for a long time. Is he sleeping? Yeah, I think he’s sleeping. Actually, he just confirmed it by asking, ‘What are we trying to figure out now?’ after I’ve been working this problem for about 3 minutes already.”

“That t-distribution I drew on the board looks like… dang it, maybe I should erase it. I can’t - then they’ll know that I know it looks like a…”

“Maybe if I write small enough, they won’t be able to read any of this…”

And when I couldn’t answer a question, I just threw on Zoolander’s Blue Steel to hide my deer-in-headlights expression.