First Week of Classes

I haven’t been blogging like i should during the past two weeks, and I apologise for that. A couple of days ago, I finally finished writing up an article of some results in graph theory form my undergrad with my advisor and it was submitted for publication. As invaluable as the experience was, I have to say that redrawing the figures for article 4 times was not the most thrilling thing I have ever experienced. Having that submitted is a huge weight off my shoulders, and I can now start really focusing on my classes. As you may have figured from the title of the post, I just had my first full week of classes. Technically, Wednesday last week was my first day, but that wasn’t a complete week. After over a week of classes, what can I tell you about grad school?

As in most mathematics graduate programs, the first year consists of basic classes in algebra, analysis and topology. I didn’t manage to test out of algebra, as I thought I might, but that also makes me happy, because it means they have very high standards on what they expect grad students to know. The class algebra is a very standard lecture course with the added fun of problem sets due every class (3 times a week), not every week. It’s keeping me busy, but it’s not challenging yet. Like I said, I’ve covered a lot of the material before. Analysis on the other hand, was my main weakness as an undergrad. It’s also a standard lecture course, and I’m finding that it takes a lot of my time, simply because I haven’t quite figured out how to do analysis problems yet. I’m trying to work on one problem every day, either from the problem set or from the book just to get used to the style and way of thinking. I’m also trying to not complain too much about it while I’m working, so I don’t annoy my office mates to death.

Topology is the most interesting of my classes thus far. It’s taught using a version of the Moore method. We get a set of notes, containing definitions, theorems and problems. Every class, we get to claim the problems we have managed to solve using the notes, and then our lecturer goes through the list alphabetically, letting us solve one problem at the board. Once we finish all the problems in a set of notes, we get a new one. This sounds simple, right? Well, we also have that our entire grades depend on the problems we solve by the board. If you can’t solve any of the problems that are left, your lose your turn. While you are up there, anyone in the room can ask you to prove anything you state on the board, just to make sure you know what you are talking about. It’s brutal, intense and amazing. I love the class. I feel like I learn more since I have to figure it out on my own, and I know I become a better presenter every time I go up there.

In addition to these classes, I also managed to convince one of the professors to let me participate in his research seminar on graph theory and matriod theory. It’s promising to be very interesting. We only had one seminar this far, but I have a lot of interesting thought to follow up. The focus of the first half of the semester is graph embeddings, which I studied a little for my senior thesis, so I even have a slight head start on some of the older grad students.

I’ll be back in a few days with some more about the social life in grad school!