Tag: graduate school

  • First Week of the Fall Term 2011 – Mathematics Graduate School

    It’s the second week of school, but with a bank holiday last Monday (09/12/11), graduate school started up slowly. It will take until next week until everyone is finally registered to all of their classes. It took me a while to do so as well, because they changed up the system from a program that…

  • Graduate Student Lectures: Great Learning Opportunities But You’ll Need Preparation

    One of the main things that graduate students need to cope with in the sciences is giving lectures. For some, they give lectures to undergrads. Others give lectures in their classes. In my case, since I am not fluent in Mandarin, I can’t serve as TA, which is what most of my classmates have to…

  • The Value of College @ The New Yorker

    Good article in the New Yorker about education and what it means to society. If college is a 4-year IQ test, then what’s grad school, especially in abstract disciplines like pure mathematics? I wonder. I fully appreciate being a graduate student in math. It makes your brain work in funny ways, and I like it.…

  • Mathematics Graduate Class Lecture Format

    This year, the graduate class format changed dramatically for me. I went from a normal class, filled with students, to classes with at the most 4 students and a professor. Actually, my Complex Analysis II class has only another student enrolled. As such, the format has changed. The professors no longer give 3h-lectures, the students…

  • My First Graduate School Rotation

    Hilarious piece over at McSweeney’s. There is a comparison between a graduate school rotation and a buddy cop movie.

  • Back At School

    It’s good to be back at school. I missed most of last week because I was teaching 30 hours. I didn’t miss much³, but I felt terrible. In the future, I won’t want to miss any school at all. My classmates were actually worried about me, which was kind of nice. I ran some errands.

  • Paracompact Spaces

    I It’s strange that I was actually researching paracompact topological spaces on Sunday and that we are seeing those types of spaces in my complex analysis class. We just started the Berenstein & Gay Complex Variables¹ book and things are pretty interesting. I actually deduced that we were heading there because of some of the…

  • Choosing the Right Grad School

    Great article I found thanks to Andrew. It’s by Danah Boyd on the importance of choosing the right grad school. I know about this and it’s important to choose the right school and the right adviser.

  • Germs & Sheaves

    I I spent most of the day reading up on differentiable manifolds, Riemann surfaces, germs, and sheaves. Some of the concepts are extremely interesting since they tie into category theory. This led me to differential geometry. I supposed that differential geometry had more to do with Euclidean geometry, an undergrad class that I didn’t enjoy…

  • Differentiable Manifolds

    I Things got abstract very quickly in complex analysis. We are constructing differentiable manifolds in the complex plane, to see the topology of  holomorphic domains. It blends together quite a few algebraic notions, as well as some beautiful topology, and it’s extremely interesting. The prof told us that this would fit neatly into a Riemann…