Well, hello, friends!

Since spring break it’s been a flurry of things to do.  I thought life would slow down until finals geared up, but that hasn’t been the case.

Two weekends ago I went to my first math conference as a grad student.  That was a lot of fun.  I got to meet new math people, to spend some time around faculty and other grad students from my own department that I know but not that well, and to hear about some new math.  I came away from the conference with two big feelings about math:

(1) I can’t wait until I know enough math and have done enough of my own research that I can give a talk.  I saw people getting excited about the work they were doing and sharing it with others, and it made me really want to be able to do that with my own work.  When I did undergrad research, I got to do this, but I didn’t really understand the big picture of the math world.  I still can’t see the whole big picture, but I am much more familiar with the culture and the point of it all now.  So when I can feel like I’m contributing to that, it will be really rewarding.  Plus, the standard for a talk now seems to either be giving a “chalk talk” (using a white board or chalkboard to write math, like in a normal math class lecture) or to give an electronic presentation made in TeX/Beamer.  (Beamer is like PowerPoint, but specifically designed for math talks and not made by Microsoft, so it’s automatically better.)  Both of these talk methods are appealing to me, so I can’t wait to experiment with the best ways to convey cutting edge mathematics and see which camp I fall into.  Am I the type of person who would use technology or not or both?

(2) I really don’t know anything about math.  I only know the basics.  I barely understood anything anyone said all weekend.  It’s slightly discouraging to feel like I’ve been living and breathing math for 2 years now and I’ve barely scratched the surface, that I still can’t really hold my own in a room full of professional mathematicians.  But it’s also exciting, that there’s still so much to learn and so much room for growth.  I have the capacity to understand everything these people were talking about, and even now if someone sat down and explained the definitions and notation from each of the talks, I would probably “get it.”  But math is so specialized and broad that if you listen to someone talking about fresh and new mathematics research, unless you are specialized in exactly the same way, even if you know a lot of math, chances are that they’ll lose you within the first 30 seconds of the talk.  It’s cool to think about the fact that I could get into a problem, and completely change gears and do something completely different but still be in the same field.

This weekend I’m going to a second conference, and this one is more closely related to some things that I might actually understand.  The conference from 2 weeks ago is somewhat related to the research I’m doing now (or gearing up to do now), but way more specialized, and in some cases less pure (theoretical) mathematics and more applied math (related to problems that come from physics or some other hard science).  This weekend’s conference is in combinatorics.  I know a little more about combinatorics than about analysis and/or number theory, and even if I don’t totally understand the talks this weekend, combinatorics problems are usually pretty clear to understand and state, but difficult to actually work out.  So I think I’ll understand more because more will be on the surface in this field of math.  I guess we’ll see…

In other news, I got my work assignment for the summer.  I got exactly what I asked for – I’ll be teaching the second half of summer (5 weeks in July-August).  It’ll be an 8-10AM class every day Monday through Thursday, the same course I’m teaching this semester (and taught last semester).  My daily routine can be teach, office hours, lunch, then study for the qualifying exam in the afternoon & evening.  I think it’ll work out well for me to have a routine.  Plus, this works out so that I can do all my travelling in the beginning of the summer – road tripping home to Pennsylvania to visit friends and family!

Also, the NFL schedule for fall 2012 came out this week, so I’ve been in football mode getting excited and trying to make plans with friends to go to Steelers games in the fall.  Exciting!

It’s funny when friends from home call or text and ask me how it’s going.  It’s hard to explain the day-to-day of what grad school is like.  It feels like I’m constantly moving and have so much to do and am being pulled in a thousand directions.  But I can’t really put my finger on anything in particular I’ve accomplished.  I can say “I did this many problems on this many homework assignments over this time period.”  But what does that mean?  Unless you’ve been in the position, all you get from that is “Oh, you go to school and you have homework.  That doesn’t sound any different from elementary school.”  And I can say “I’ve been teaching and doing things for class (prepping lecture notes, grading, etc).”  And all you get from that is “Oh, you’re a teacher.  That doesn’t sound any different from what thousands of teachers do every day.”  And I can say “I am a student AND a teacher!” And what you get from that is “Oh, you’re working two jobs.  Lots of people do that.”  It’s hard to explain…

For example, Tuesday I got a haircut and got coffee at Starbucks afterwards and both my hairdresser and my barista asked me why I had a chunk of time in the middle of the day to do “nothing,” (get my hair cut and get coffee) and I don’t know what to tell them.  It makes what should be a normal social interaction into something super awkward.  And the same goes for phone conversations with people from home.  “How are you?  How’s school?  What have you been up to?”  “Oh, you know, it’s school.  I’ve been doing stuff.  It’s busy and stressful but I’m happy.”  That doesn’t at all describe what my life is like.  UGH.

So, there’s your update on what my life has been like.  Sort of.