Category Archives: Personal Experience

Misconceptions of Math Grad School

5 Comments Posted by on August 4, 2017

In my day job, I am a graduate student in the MIT Math Department, an experience I’ve reflected on before in What I Wish I Knew When I Got to Graduate School and Why I Didn’t Do Research In Your Area. Both of those posts focused on graduate school as a whole, naturally inflected by my own experience but not primarily discussing aspects unique to my department. In this post, I’d like to focus on the particulars of going to graduate school in math, centered on five of my own previous misconceptions of it.

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Math, Personal Experience, Weekly Post , ,

What’s in Our Board Game Collection

3 Comments Posted by on July 28, 2017

When I first got to graduate school here at MIT, I came pretty empty-handed on the board game front. The few that I had owned in college, I had given away to friends or left at home with my family. Now, nearly five years later, Grace and I have built up a decent collection of board games. It’s intentionally somewhat of an eclectic set, reflecting both of our tastes as well as avoiding overlap with the collections of several of our friends. (So don’t read too much into any absences from this list!)

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board games, Personal Experience, Weekly Post , ,

Truth Telling Under Uncertainty

Leave a comment Posted by on July 21, 2017

“Thou shalt not lie.” Perhaps the most misquoted commandment of them all is actually not that broad:

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Personal Experience, Philosophy, politics, Weekly Post , , , , , ,

Your Utility Function Does Not Compute

1 Comment Posted by on July 7, 2017

Last week, I wrote about some of the ways that we show that we don’t truly value everyone equally, despite the prevalence of such principles in popular discourse and the Declaration of Independence that we celebrated on Tuesday.

This week, I’d like to take a look at a couple more aspects of modern life that don’t make any sense to me from this perspective. Read more of this post

Personal Experience, Philosophy, Weekly Post , , , ,

Cherish Thick Communities

8 Comments Posted by on June 16, 2017

Since graduating from Caltech five years ago, I have gone back to visit on eight occasions, for at least a week each trip. Why? What keeps drawing me back there?

It’s definitely not because of the location; as much as I like In-N-Out and boba milk tea, they aren’t worth flying across the country for. Actually, each visit has driven home more and more to me that I don’t really want to live in LA long-term, with its ridiculous sprawl, traffic, and general lack of a third dimension.

Photo courtesy of Brynan Qiu, who was riding with me in a rental car I was driving.

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Personal Experience, Weekly Post , , ,

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