That's 5 out of 8 exams done for you non-maths people .

The last 3 have all gone well. The first one was on statistical methods in insurance, this was more a test of how fast you could get the answers down then anything else. I messed up on one part, tried to fix it, but quickly gave up and moved on. I got everything else out so I was pretty happy with that.

The second one was on continuous time financial models. Another test I had to learn the entire course from scratch for. I only ended up covering enough material to do the first 3 questions (the paper is 4 questions, do 3) but I got most of them out, just a couple things at the end of the questions I couldn't finish. The first question was on the Feynman-Kac formula, it's been a while since I've really enjoyed doing a maths problem but I spent several hours straight trying to solve the past exam papers for this question. I frequently get very bored and distracted studying maths these days, Isura recently posted a blog about being "in the zone" and that's how it felt with these questions, I didn't even notice the hours. I actually got up in the middle of the night to try and solve a problem that was keeping me awake.

I've just finished the third exam which was on measure theory and martingales. It's a pure maths subject which means lots of definitions, theorems, questions that you have to learn the answers off for rather then being able to solve them, and lots of stupid little notation. I hate having to learn things off, it's so tedious. I was up all last night trying to learn definitions, the first time I've had to pull an all-nighter for ages, and in the end I only got about two and a half hours work done because I was so bored. I probably would have been better off going to sleep and trying to wake up early. Oh well.

The exam itself went fine, I ran pretty good with the paper. I'd learned off enough stuff to answer all of 1 question and almost all of another. It was another 4 questions, do 3 style exam. I managed to make mediocre attempts at a couple of parts for a third question just in case the lecturer is feeling generous.

The last 3 exams should go much better, all the financial maths and pure maths papers are out of the way. I have 2 stats papers and 1 finance paper left, it'll be nice being able to understand what I'm learning for a change.