Today marks the end of the first fourth of the calendar year 2013.  It’s also the end of the second third of the Spring 2013 semester.  It has been a weird and stressful year so far, and it will probably only get weirder.

I’ve got a lot of different possibilities for how to spend my summer.  Unfortunately, there’s an administrative hold-up that is leaving a huge question mark around how much paid work I’ll be able to get this summer, if any (it’s not just me that’s affected; it’s all the grad students in our department).  That’s my major stressor of the week this week.  Until my summer income is decided, I can’t really commit to any fun or travel.  I did buy tickets to fly home for my sister’s college graduation in May this week, back when the outlook for summer income was much more positive than it is right now.  I also applied for a US passport this week (which is EXPENSIVE) because an opportunity has presented itself for travel to Europe this summer.  Somehow these things always seem to work themselves out, but right now it is ridiculously stressful.

The semester started out very crazy (which is why I haven’t written in a while).  I was juggling so many things in the air and I was really struggling to keep it all together.  Since those first few weeks, I’ve let a few of those things fall, either temporarily or permanently, which let me finally level out to a place of sanity some time right before spring break.  Then I had about 2-3 weeks of peace before this summer funding crisis presented itself and I’m right back to where I was before, emotionally speaking.

The class I’m teaching, Business Calculus, is going better than expected.  It’s a GREAT warm-up for me to teach a really, really watered-down version of calculus before I teach actual calculus (which will hopefully happen next year some time).  My students are doing relatively well, and their collective attitude isn’t nearly as bad as I expected from a room full of business majors.  They also seem to like me, which isn’t a necessity, but it definitely makes my job that much easier.

The classes I’m taking are continuations of what I took last fall.  In Ergodic Theory, the material is more difficult than it was last semester, but the general vibe from the class is much better – it’s less intense.  In Measure Theory, the material is more theoretical (and therefore easier for me) than it was last semester, and my grades have gone up significantly from last semester.  The spring is overall presenting new challenges that weren’t present in the fall, but I think I’m handling it all better now.

The class I’m grading for, which I was concerned about before the semester started, has been WAY easier to deal with than expected.  There are fewer students than the last time I graded for this class, so that’s fewer papers to grade and less time (only 3 hours per week instead of 8-12).  Also, about 90% of the problems I have to grade are ones that were also assigned the last time I graded for this class, so I already have solution keys and grading rubrics written up.  That saves me a LOT of time.  The students are still doing poorly, and it can be emotionally draining to see senior level math students failing to correctly solve freshman level problems.  However, since there are fewer students in the class, I only see the infuriating fatal errors in understanding 10-15 times per grading session, rather than 30-40 times per grading session.  This is much better for my emotional state while grading.

Finally we come to the real beast: my research.  I still love it.  And ever since things leveled out in other areas around spring break, I’ve been able to devote as much time to it per week as I wish I’d been doing all along.  This means I’m making more progress at a faster pace than I had been the rest of the year.  I feel like I’m almost done with all of the computing I’ll need to do for the problem and I’m almost ready for the actual theoretical math to begin.  I’ve already proved a few little things along the way (little propositions that simplify what I need to be doing), but the big theorem that I’m after feels almost attainable now.  This is good, considering I’m supposed to have publishable results written up by the end of summer.  There are easy cases I can already see my way through, and I feel almost ready to look at the harder cases and the big picture.

It’s hard to believe I’m already over halfway through my PhD.  I remember the end of college so vividly, I remember how excited I was when I got into grad school, I remember how nervous I felt about moving alone halfway across the country, I remember driving to Texas from Pennsylvania, I remember meeting my classmates for the first time.  I remember the whirlwind that was my first year of grad school – full of social, romantic, and mathematical surprises, joys, and challenges.  I remember the agony of studying for qualifying exams, then taking the exams, then the utter elation of finding out that I had passed.  And some day not too far from now, I’ll be able to write a sentence summarizing what I remember about this exact time in my life, this third year of grad school.  It’s not clear yet whether this will be the best year, the worst year, or somewhere in between.  Too many really good things have happened, mixed in with some pretty bad things. Not sure yet what the big picture will look like with the benefit of hindsight.

Grad school in general is a weird thing.  It feels like the greatest accomplishment of your life, but it’s one that very few people can understand or appreciate.  A lot of people don’t understand why someone would spend their time and money on a graduate degree.  Especially a PhD.  Especially in math.  I have friends & family back home who literally think I work with “imaginary numbers.”  (You know who you are! :))  The American education system is such that people can graduate high school and even college without understanding what mathematics really is, and so that makes it hard for the general public (ie, people who never take a math class beyond calculus) to understand or care about what goes into earning a math PhD.  I don’t think I’m clued into some deeper truth for having this knowledge or anything, it just gets hard to have a conversation as simple as “How are you?  What are you up to these days?”  And it’s even harder to justify the insanity that has led me personally down this path to math grad school since I don’t feel strongly about what type of career I want to pursue once I complete my degree.  The only thing strongly pulling me in any direction is my love of research, but that’s not really a talking point in the “What are you going to do when you finish?” conversation because math research is hard to explain, even to people who are in math.  If I knew for certain I wanted to be a teacher, at least I’d have some tangible, understandable goal in mind that people could use to rationalize my silly decision to obtain a math PhD.

I know in the previous paragraph I used trivializing words like “insanity” and “silly” to talk about this path that I’m on in life.  I make grad school seem like it’s not a “good” or “smart” decision.  I think it lies somewhere in between.  And right now, I have to get back to work.  Maybe philosophizing some more about graduate degrees will make a good discussion for another day.