Catching Up on Graduation, Summer, & Graduate School
So, I've been reading some of my friends blog posts & felt inspired today to sit down and write. A lot has happened in the past few months.
First, this time last year I was lining up graduate school that I wanted to apply to. After a long, stressful process of applying...waiting...and getting my fair share of rejection & wait list letters...I was accepted to the Pure Mathematics Ph.D. program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It took me a while to commit--mostly because I was holding out on getting into a school in Georgia--but finally I chose to take a leap of faith & sign on the dotted line. I'm here now, and I love it! But more about that later.
In May, I graduated from Butler University. It was truly one of the most bitter sweet moments in my life. I was so excited to be moving on to graduate school, but I can't tell you how much I miss Butler. My friends, professors, co-workers...and the dogs (Blue II, you are greatly missed!)...are all part of the wonderful memories that I miss the most. My blood will always run blue.
Over the summer, I spent 8 weeks in Michigan at Oakland University participating in a research group. We had a lot of fun, and I loved attending church at The Apostolic Church of Auburn Hills. To all of my 20something friends there...I miss you all!
The rest of the summer was spent relaxing, packing, & getting ready for a visit from my British family, the Millers. I was so excited that they were coming here that I'm pretty sure everyone around me got sick of hearing about it. Alas, their visit was wonderful and yet so short! I wish they could have stayed forever! I hope that I'll be able to visit them again soon...but time will tell. :0)
Sitting on a bench on the lovely campus at UNL and enjoying the sunshine. It's nestled behind the library in a cute little garden and I'm being misted by the sprinklers that are keeping the plants alive in the middle of our semi-drought.
Ok, there's a lot more than just a bench and a garden in my current adventure.
So far, I love it here! The city has around 800,000 people, so it's not too big or congested. I have my own apartment (*sigh*) that I love dearly. And school is better than I could have imagined.
Lincoln isn't necessarily a top vacation spot, but living here has been wonderful. I don't have to worry about traffic (Indy, I love you, but even there, rush hour is no fun!). I live just south of downtown, so some days I'm able to walk to school (although I discovered yesterday that walking makes me hyper, and hyper doesn't exactly translate well in teaching a 8:30 class). And there are a ton of places I've yet to explore (one of which is the Farmers Market, which I'm heading to in the morning). Some students say Lincoln is boring (translate that to read that there isn't much of a night life), but I find that it suits me perfectly.
I spend a lot of time at my apartment, because, honestly, it just makes me happy. I have wood floors, white cabinets, a beautiful bathroom, and lots of space to fill. I moved here with the essentials and I'm gradually building up from that. That means, right now I have everything I need in my bedroom, but practically a bare living room. However, I love the idea of a blank canvas. Now, over the next few months, I can infuse my space with beautiful things!
School hasn't been too overwhelming, as of yet. First, I'm taking three classes. We have a homework assignment each week in almost all of them, but so far, I've only stayed up once past midnight to finish. The pace is definitely much faster and the details really matter. If I do nothing else, I will at least perfect my proof writing skills by the end of the semester.
The hardest thing in some of my classes is that we are building our "knowledge" from the ground up. That being said, I'm not necessarily learning everything for the first time, but rather, I can't assume on a homework assignment that I know something unless we have proved it in class. For anyone who has taken a proof writing course, you know how complicated this can get. I'm talking about even basic things can't be assumed.
For example, if I said that the number 64 was even, no one would doubt me, right? Well, a statement like that won't cut it in our proofs right now. I would have to prove that 64 is even based on the definition of an even number, which says that any number n is even if you can write it as the product of 2*k, where k is another number. Hence, by the definition of an even number, because 64=2*32, 64 is even.
Then, sometimes it's even pickier than that. Suppose we were working with just integers (whole numbers). We can't write 7 as 2*k, where k is an integer, but we can write 7 as 2*(7/2), where k is a rational number (fraction). Hence, 7 is not an even number in the group of integers, but it is an even number in the group of rationals.
Ok, now you've had a taste of what proof writing looks like for a first year math grad. And hopefully, I haven't scared you away. I promise, no more proofs in the rest of my post.
The second thing I do as part of being a graduate student is teach. I was given the wonderful opportunity of having my tuition paid for in exchange for being a Graduate Teaching Assistant. I'm not the main teacher of a course, but rather I see my students twice a week in what we call recitation, while they attend a larger Calculus 2 lecture two other days in the week. If there was a cyber symbol for excitement...put it here: I LOVE TEACHING!!!!
My students are great & I've accomplished one thing that really makes me proud. In our orientation week, we were warned again and again that most likely, students won't come to your office hours for help. Well, I can proudly say that in the three weeks of school, I've only had one office hour where a student didn't come in for help. Yay!!! It was my goal from the start to be approachable, and I think I've accomplished that so far. In fact, this last Thursday, I had so many students come to me before class (which isn't technically an office hour, but I'll help them anyways), that we had a mini class in the student lounge. Can I say...happy Erica!
Now, hopefully my students are just asking questions without learning. We have yet to have an exam, so I guess that will be the real first measure of my success (or areas of improvement) as a teacher.
Ok, I could go on and on...but class starts in seven minutes and most of the graduate students are overly ambitious, so the room is probably almost full. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more often so that my next post won't be so long.
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