"Political science is pretty much the same as finance, it seems."

I'd have to agree - there are quite a few differences, but being an academic aseems to be largely the same regardless of your discipline. It's still populated with nerdy people no matter what the department/discipline is.

I think some of the characteristics that make for differences across disciplines are large school/small school, research/teaching, humanities/technical/science, quantitative/non-quant.

But there are many more, I'm sure.
The Unknown Professor | Homepage | 01.06.08 - 8:13 pm | #

Nice hack! I'll keep it in mind for next quarter.

-Matt

P.S. Love the blog, especially the random bits on academia in general (like below!). Political science is pretty much the same as finance, it seems.
Matt | 01.06.08 - 7:45 pm | #

Michael:

Thanks - I'm always looking for more reference books, and they look interesting.
The Unknown Professor | Homepage | 01.02.08 - 11:46 pm | #

As an alternative to your IF() function, you can also use MAX(), e.g., =MAX(Scheme1,Scheme2).

If you're looking for some good Excel reference books, see John Walkenbach's "Excel 2000 [or 2007, etc] Formulas" and "Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA". His website is www.j-walk.com.

"Financial Modeling Using Excel and VBA" by Chandan Sengupta is also excellent; it has good synopses of the financial theory, followed by formula-driven spreadsheets, and then VBA-driven spreadsheets.
Michael K. McCaffrey, MS, CFA | 01.02.08 - 6:22 pm | #