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Are Second year and First year economics closely linked?

Hi there, I am an economics student at Aston uni currently going into my second year. I have completed my first year degree with results that I am happy with and haven’t found the content too difficult as of yet.

However, with my first year being solely online and with me never having studied economics before my degree I am concerned I may struggle with my second year.

All my first year exams were open book and I did a lot of cramming for exams so the content I needed to know for my exam I feel I don’t know at all anymore. My question is how well will I need to know my first year content for my second year? And is there a huge step up in the difficultly of an Economics degree?
Original post by Magnum_nasus
Hi there, I am an economics student at Aston uni currently going into my second year. I have completed my first year degree with results that I am happy with and haven’t found the content too difficult as of yet.

However, with my first year being solely online and with me never having studied economics before my degree I am concerned I may struggle with my second year.

All my first year exams were open book and I did a lot of cramming for exams so the content I needed to know for my exam I feel I don’t know at all anymore. My question is how well will I need to know my first year content for my second year? And is there a huge step up in the difficultly of an Economics degree?

There's a natural progression like in most degrees so most find second year trickier than first. The primary reason for this is that everybody tends to have a module in introductory econometrics which most find is the hardest area of economics.

Beyond this, personally I found second year a little harder than first year but you're smarter, a year older and more settled into uni life so the step up isn't crazy or anything. But you'll likely need to know a fair bit of content from first year. This will be your basic macro and micro (especially consumer and producer theory), you'll also need to have a decent grasp of your intro maths and stats modules from first year for second year. The general topics will be differentiation, matrix algebra, constrained and unconstrained optimization for maths knowledge and then stuff like hypothesis testing, ANOVA, regression (OLS) and matrix algebra for statistics, this knowledge will be vital for your intro econometrics course.

It's worth noting that this isn't always the same at every uni. For example, if you don't cover something in first year (e.g. linear algebra) then naturally they wouldn't expect you to know it in second year.

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