Hopefully there will be more to come next week along the lines of an actually informative update from yours truly.  But for now, I’ll just tell you that I’m defending my master’s project on Wednesday of next week (5 days away!!!!) and so my weekend is going to be completely consumed by that.  I feel like there’s a lot to do, but it’s something I’m interested in and will likely lead to a PhD dissertation, so I’m enjoying it a lot.

Fourteen days or less until the semester is over.  Then I’ll have completed two years of a math PhD program.  It’s unbelievable, really.  I didn’t dream of this as a little girl, but it’s something I’ve grown passionate about over the last 5 or 6 years.  For all of the complaining and work and exhaustion and confusion in my life, this is a really rewarding experience and I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else with myself right now.

I’ll talk about this more later, I suspect, but going to those two conferences this month has given me a new perspective on a career in academia.  I do really love research and solving difficult problems and talking about it, so maybe academia really IS for me.  It’s high-risk, high-reward, I think.  The whole scene terrifies me sometimes (the pressures, the bureaucracy, the tedious paperwork to get funding, having to be social enough within the math community to find people who will collaborate on research with you, not to mention teaching and enduring the drama/stress/disappointment that comes with teaching the American youth in this education system, etc).  But other times I think it may be really great for me.  I’m still on the fence about what to do with my degree once I have it, but I’m intrigued by the academic life now more than I ever have been before.

And in case anyone was wondering, the title of this post is a C++ reference regarding my attitude toward academia (it’s increasing).  But now it’s back to work!