(Under) Qualified (Part One)
Six p.m. on a Friday, and you’re still in your office. Door shut, staring blankly at a computer screen. I wasn’t planning to start off too heavy on the symbolism, but why would you choose to spend your life in a windowless box? It’s the destination, why d’you gotta make it the journey as well?
It’s a bad day for it, too. The sort of day where any sane person would be outside, enjoying the evening air and spending time with other people. Normal people. Interesting people. People who could enrich your life, bring meaning to your muddle, give you the gift of variety beyond the tunnel-vision world that you occupy. But you. You strange, strange, str-str-str-strange thing that you are, you’d rather be there breathing in the chalk dust and staring fruitlessly at a paper. You’re not going to understand it, you do realize? You’ve been staring at it for four hours, maybe five - even I’m not sure at this point - and you’re still not sure what an isolated type is or how in the hell you wound up doing model theory. I mean, you are many things but a model theorist is /not/ one of them. Close the document, I beg of thee.
Of course, you won’t do that. There might be something useful in there, some new way to look at the latest problem you’ve set yourself. After all, your qual is coming up. The big day. The biggest of days. You’re going to have to stand there in front of (gasp) your advisor and your almost-advisor-but-that-one-academic-match-making-meeting-was-kind-of-awkward and some guy from Lie Groups that you dragged in because you did a course at one point and it was the only thing you could think of for your minor topic.
You have to be right where you are. You have to be studying away, with all the diligence of the damned. Buried before you’re dead, except instead of a coffin it’s your office and instead of earth piling up atop you it’s a mountain of definitions you don’t remember and instead of a priest it’s your advisor asking you a question and you stare at her blankly because you do not for the life of you remember what any of those words mean and -
Oh. You’re panicking. Oh dear.
Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Lots of people fail their
Well. A few people fail their quals. It’s not the end of the world.
Though you’ve never met anyone who failed their qual, have you? Maybe they just won’t admit to it. Shame. Humiliation, even. The unlucky 1%, the only 1% you’ve any chance of making it into you aspiring academic, you.
But you’ll be fi-i-ine. You’ve got a syllabus. Cribbed from a list your advisor sent you, questions some other student of hers you’ve never met presumably survived. How, you have no idea. Because you’ve never heard of half the things on here, even though you d e f initely should have, and you’ve been avoiding learning the other half because they sound scary. But hey, you’ll always have Lie groups.
You’ve got to focus, you tell yourself. You spin in your chair to look at your chalkboard, at the practice problems you’ve hunted-and-gathered from the weird-n-wild corners of math.overflow, to the weirder-n-wilder corners of the brains of your academic siblings. Of the ten you’ve got, you’ve managed to solve two and both of those were rather like pulling teeth.
You sigh and run your hand down your face. This is hopeless. You’re hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere at this rate. No, this calls for some outside intervention.
Do you:
A) Reach out to your advisor - she’ll set the questions, maybe if you look pathetic enough, she’ll give you hints about what you ought to focus on. But you’ll be exposing your soft, squishy belly like the desperate little pup you are.
B) Email the student who’s syllabus you’re using. He’s still listed as a student at the school, when you google him, though you’ve never spoken to him. Honestly, you’re pretty sure you’ve never even seen him. But he passed the exam using this syllabus. He might be able to identify the key ideas.
C) Beg your academic siblings for help. You’re all in this together, right? They might not be able to help, and suffering shared might not be suffering divided, but at least they’ll be suffering too. If all else fails, you can see if they’ll pity-comp your dinner.
D) Surely there’s something in this model theory paper that can help. Or at least something your committee doesn’t know - when in doubt, apply surface level understanding of something completely unrelated. Confusion is always your friend (apart from when it’s your enemy).
What To Do?
Ask your advisor for help
Contact the student
Beg your academic siblings
Trust to model theory
Voting ended onJun 1, 2025
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