Blog: Confessions of a Mathematician

You know, in my first semester of graduate school, I celebrated the end of every week. “I made it one more week!” was the refrain for all the new grad students. My first semester as faculty? By the end of every week I was too tired to even form a coherent sentence. Maybe it’s because there isn’t exactly a whole class of newbie professors who see each other everyday, or maybe it’s because there’s always a full weekend’s worth of work to do, but I just didn’t work up the energy for celebrating on Fridays.

Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.

—John Allen Paulos

I had this grand plan that I would begin my days by leisurely blogging. Ha. The semester is flying by! I am barely on top of the things I absolutely need to do everyday, and even then, I occasionally find myself with half a lecture prepared and twenty minutes to finish the other half. Fortunately, I work well under pressure. Unfortunately, I don’t do anything else well under pressure. My job here is intense; the students are smart, motivated, committed, and genuinely kind and thoughtful.

My friends are really the coolest people you could hope to meet. Thanks, Melanie!

I had my first pre-semester stress dream. I was teaching my first day of calc 1, and I had this really cool activity planned that would get students out of their seats and talking to one another, but it totally flopped. Not only that, but I couldn’t get the document projector to display the syllabus (which I had to borrow from a prepared student because I didn’t even have a copy of the syllabus), I barely managed to get the students to pay attention, and I forgot to assign the first homework assignment.

Or: Gearing up for the job market; thank God it’s not me this time.

Hey friends!  Now that I’ve been on the market once, I’m qualified to give you advice.  Here’s the first part in an n-part series.

Your materials!  They’re how you let the job market know who you are and what you have to offer.  But you knew that already.  My first piece of advice is get a working draft of your teaching and research statements by the end of next week.  Why?  Because they’re hard to write, and it only gets harder once the semester starts.  Once you have a draft, you’ve done the hard work of thinking about your teaching and research, and you can relax and edit those puppies while grading stacks of exams.

So. I’ve been at the Project NExT workshop, and I have bjillions of reflections about my own teaching to share, but I need to synthesize them. (Also, the schedule is packed!) In the meantime… You know your graduate school trained excellent problem-solvers when, as part of a group of about a hundred people waiting to take elevators up from the third floor, you decide to dash down the stairs to the second floor to catch the elevator and you see the rest of the people from your grad program already casually waiting in the empty elevator lobby.

Here’s a video of my new office. Note the abundance of green. It’s going to be weird to have an office to myself after years with the best officemates ever. They’ll just have to come visit…

You only get to say “absolutely nothing” if you sing it. Today I’m headed to Hampshire College to talk about ideals, varieties, and their applications. If you were lucky enough to sit through my job talk, you already know (or at least already dozed through) what I’ll talk about. Starting with a 4 by 4 sudoku puzzle, I’ll define ideals and varieties and explain how they’re useful for solving problems (like… a 4 by 4 sudoku puzzle).

I’m writing this FROM MY BRAND NEW OFFICE. On my BRAND NEW OFFICE COMPUTER. Although I’m a linux girl at heart, and will certainly run Ubuntu on my laptop, I requested a mac here at Hamilton because (a) they (reasonably!) don’t support linux for faculty and (b) that means that to run Macaulay2 and other commalg software, I needed a mac. Having once tried to get M2 running on a windows machine…