Oh man how can you do math? It's so hard!

Yeah, I know, math is hard. You know what else is hard? Any subject if you study it thoroughly enough. People seem to have a much different relationship with math than other subjects, however, so that whenever I admit I am, indeed, pursuing a graduate education in mathematics, their first impulse is to tell me about how hard math was for them. Do you often tell your doctor about how you failed organic chemistry? Are people mentioning all the time to reporters how they were never any good with sentence structure? This is why we have a specialized society.

I am a graduate student in mathematics. We are not a group known for our prowess in social situations. But people, you aren't doing us any favours when the first thing you tell is that our chosen life is so difficult, or boring, or something you could never do. Most of us can only come back with a weak "haha yeah I dunno". We aren't all super geniuses (some are, I am not). We spend years learning math. It all seemed like crazy gibberish to me, too, before I had spent 5 years (and counting) learning it.

I think people are afraid that we are constantly on the precipice of launching into a proof of the Sobolev Embedding Theorem or something, and feel the need to convince us that that would be a bad idea. Don't worry, we are not. If you are not studying math, anything I talk to you about that is vaguely math related will probably be related to baseball as well. I spend a good amount of my time trying to explain calculus to people who think they are being punished for something, I don't have an urge to continue trying teach when I am at a party. Now, if you want my take on GMRES or the conjugate gradient method, I'll be happy to give it. But don't worry people, I am not scouting bars for potential students to talk at about my studies. I'll leave that to the political scientists.

People also like to ask what I do all day, as if they think mathematicians spend their days stroking long white beards (hopefully attached to the same person stroking them) and staring at clouds, occasionally stopping to scrawl out a proof on a chalkboard. Perhaps you think we spend our time calculating integrals, that our research looks a lot like your calculus homework (I wish we could still credit for "discovering" the chain rule, I'd be published already). My day is not that uncommon. I go to class, work on homework or research, read papers, teach, and dick around on the internet just like everybody else.

I also  tend to get (mostly from middle aged men in bars for some reason) the question "what do you do with a PhD in math?" I guess it's hard for someone in pharmaceutical sales or business management to figure out why anyone would pay a mathematician. They see us, think about their old calculus homework, think about profit margins or something like that, and think to them selves "you can't sell a theorem to anybody". The easy way out of this is to lie and say I like teaching and want to be a professor. People accept this as perfectly reasonable and noble, and exactly what they would have guessed. This is because most people think a professor is more or less the same thing as a high school teacher. Don't get me wrong, I would never knock teaching as a profession. I have had (and am related to) some great teachers, and have great respect for that profession. But I (and most professors and TAs at major research universities) do not have a passion for teaching. I don't mind it, and I know it is important so I work hard to be the best TA I can be. But I am not here to teach. I want to "do research". I want to find out things no one yet knows about our world, our universe, and (and here is the domain only math can reach) fundamental truth. I don't care where I am doing it.

But how do I explain that to someone with no idea what a mathematician can discover? How do I convince the guy in the bar that, no, I do not want to be an actuary, and yes, I am aware that that profession pays well?

So here's My Point. Don't be afraid of math. Everyone loves watching planet earth on TV, and reading things about sustainable energy in popular science, but nobody wants to hear about the article in the SIAM news. People think they won't understand any article about what is going on in math. Well, you don't really understand that article you just read on the boy who was "cured" of HIV. Raise your hand if read about that and now can explain why and how it happened. Anyone? Ok, fine, anyone who is not a biologist? But you found it interesting and you took something from it anyway. So don't be afraid of those SIAM articles. Google SIAM and click on "siam news". If you are feeling brave (or maybe you are already not so afraid of math) go to ams.org and click around. Read the featured column. You don't have to understand the math, just take a look at what it is accomplishing. You might be amazed. You might even be interested. And it might make our next conversation a lot less awkward.

I should write stuff more

So. I have been a graduate student for one and a half semesters. I have not written anything about any of it. Perhaps it is time I started to chronicle my adventures here at UW. They say it is a good idea to keep a dream journal (who says that?), so maybe it is a good idea to put down some of the stuff that has happened in this grad school dream.

I should clarify. When I say "grad school dream", I don't mean it like "oh man I am living the dream this is amazing". Don't get me wrong, I'm happy, and I enjoy what I am doing. But you don't go to grad school for the fun of it, you go to get your degree. That "living the dream" crap comes after. What I mean when I say "grad school dream" is that grad school shares that unique quality of dreaming that nothing seems out of the ordinary. In a dream, you can be sitting on top of a plane the size of a child's big wheel on your way home from spring break and not be bothered by that at all.  Similarly, if a 2000 lb giant flesh eating squirrel exploded through the wall of the average grad student's office, his reaction would probably be to go looking for a saddle he could put on the thing so he didn't have to take the bus to work anymore. This is the reaction of a person in a dream, or a grad student just being a grad student. Any normal person, you know, the type who went and got a real job and makes money and stuff, would of course realize that keeping a 2000 lb squirrel in a small studio apartment in downtown Madison is not at all practical. Plus you'd have to feed it.

Anyway, I spent half of last summer in pretty much the best possible version of "still living with his parents". For one, it was very temporary. Furthermore, my parents moved to a beach. Jackpot. I would go running along the shores of lake Michigan and do my push ups and such on the beach every morning. Hard to beat for a summer. That information isn't all that relevant to my story of being a grad student. I just wanted to make you jealous.

I got to Madison early, a month and a half before the start of the semester. Nothing happened. Anyone who tells you different, anything about "white wizards" is a dirty liar.

So I am a graduate student. I have been for something like half of a year, and I am starting to understand what it is. Well, maybe that is a lie. But I have some ideas at least. Like I know I wasn't surprised when Skippy the 2000 lb squirrel burst through my wall.

Decision made, or how I became a Graduate Student at the University of Wisconsin

Ok, honesty first: I am not a graduate student at UW. I am an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. However, barring something drastic happening, I will be a student in the mathematics PhD program at UW in about four months time, and I think the story starts here. This is the beginning, the genesis of my life as a graduate student. The prologue to the story. The conception before birth. The spike in progesterone that occurs in the first trimester. The

er, sorry. That got weird.
Moving on then...

Choosing a graduate school is hard. That surprised me. First off, I had no idea what type of school would take me, where I fell on the great student ranking that exist no where but the minds of terrified undergrads worried they won't have a future because there are so many better students out there. So I did the logical thing (ha) and spent a month's worth of rent applying to 13 schools covering what I thought was a pretty wide range of selectivity. Let them decide where I should go! All in all I received offers from 6 schools, an outright rejection from MIT (shocking, right?) and silence from the other 6. I guess those schools didn't want to hurt my feelings or something. When applying, I had mistakenly envisioned receiving offers from only a couple of schools, one of which would be clearly better than the others. I don't know why I thought this would happen. It did not. All the schools I received an offer from, indeed all the schools I applied to, had a lot of merits. My decision would in no way be easy. Maybe, I thought, visiting would make it clear where I was supposed to be. It did not.

The next month or so (ok ok I am skipping over the anxiety of waiting for more acceptances, my 6 offers were strung out over a month or so, but once you get the first one the anxiety goes away a little) I got to experience the surprisingly stressful life of a recruit.

Quick aside: I am one of those crazy college football fans who checks the best team blog (mgoblog.com in the case of Michigan) hourly, and keeps up to date with the decisions of the best high school football players in the country. I like to think that my experience was a little like those of the future NFL stars that I read about. I am wrong, but it makes me feel important. I imagine someone reading a blog post somewhere about how much I enjoyed my visit to Utah and envisioning how I would help their math department defeat their rival math department in some sort of nerd bowl.

I was lucky enough to be invited to take free trips to the schools I was considering. My first trip was to UW, and I loved it. Madison is Ann Arbor but bigger, and with a lake. I was ready to choose then and there but I knew I had to consider some other options. I next took a trip to Raleigh to visit NCSU. The people in the math bio program there are awesome, as is the program itself, but I knew I would choose UW over NC State. Good, I thought. Visits are clearing things up for me. Then I went to Pittsburgh. The University of Pittsburgh seemed like a great place to be. I felt there exactly how I had felt in Wisconsin. Suddenly, the decision became more difficult.

The last trip I took was to Salt Lake City, to visit the University of Utah. Putting aside all the restrictions on alcohol that the state of Utah has, this was a great visit as well. The grad students and professors I met at Utah were unbelievable. The applied math department and mathematical biology group at Utah would have certainly been a great fit for me. But that was true of Pittsburgh and Wisconsin as well. My difficulty would not be in saying yes to one of these places. It would be hard to turn the other two down!

And so I returned home, unsure of what my decision would be, or even how I would make it. I could see myself at any of the three, and I am sure I could be successful at any of them. It took a couple of days of soul searching and daydreaming, but eventually I made my decision. Of the three programs, Pittsburgh and Utah both had groups focused on math biology who were motivated by biological questions which could be answered in part by math, while Wisconsin had only a few faculty interested in biology and were mostly focused on applied math in general. This distinction, I knew, would make the difference. However, I did not know what side of that divide I fell on. I hope to never lose interest in physiology and medicine, but ultimately, I came to realize, I wanted my impact to be on the world of mathematics. It is the mathematical questions that interest me, and applied math at UW would give me the best focus on mathematics and how to apply it to a wide range of problems.

And so I am off to UW next fall. I am leaving the wolverine state and heading to the badger state. Apparently I like weasels. I plan to make this blog more funny than serious in the future, but this initial post was necessary to set the stage. This is a blog about being a grad student, so I think I won't write much until I actually am one. In the mean time, I have to finish up here in Ann Arbor, then relax on a beach for a couple of months. Then life gets interesting.