Everything is Math. Right?

At least, almost everything is math, according to my advising family.

Olin tries to provide a lot of support for students through a variety of channels. Perhaps the most obvious academic support is through advisors. Each advisor has between ten and a dozen advisees, and the advisor and advisees form an advising family. My advisor is a math professor, Aaron. This is only his third year here, and one's first few groups of advisees tend to larger than normal, so this -- combined with the fact that some of the very math-y people have transferred into Aaron's advising family -- means that there was only one slot in the family for a freshman.

A week and a half ago during orientation, the freshmen had lunch with their advisors. I had a good conversation with Aaron, but being his only first-year advisee then felt pretty weird. Today was the first advising family meeting, and it was awesome. The upperclassmen had a dynamic with each other and with Aaron, and I could just slide into that and find my place. Even better -- and I'm not sure if this was the Office of Student Life being awesome or if it's largely thanks to transfers -- Aaron has a very math-y advising family, to the point that he said we should discuss all the non-math business first then get to the math discussions. A group of people in which math is all on its own as an important topic of conversation? Oh, yes, I'll take that.

We met for an hour during lunch, and it's been a while since I've laughed that much. It was comfortable, not at all intimidating, and I'm looking forward to our advising family supper in about a month. There's such a variety of people, but it felt so cohesive -- just a bunch of people who want to take the classes and do things in which they have interest and who love talking about those things. A side effect of this was that there were a lot of questions about whether certain combinations of classes (usually involving general requirements) are poor ideas. It was really informative, but I also realized how many acronyms for classes/requirements there are that I still don't know.

And then we switched to math. Aaron asked, "Is that all the non-math business?" and the person beside me said, "Everything is math!"
The discrete math class is using a really new book written by someone I've met (sarah-marie belcastro, and yes, she spells her name with lowercase letters), and they were discussing that book. The person who is teaching the first meeting of Midnight Mathematicians is in the family, the upperclassmen told me to come to Putnam prep, there's one person taking a math class at Wellesley (when he first walked in the students thought he was the teacher), and there's another person who is doing their Self Study (a graduation requirement) in abstract algebra. Math! I felt so at home.

It wasn't just the math, though. I'm just not sure how else to describe it -- comfortable, laughing, joking, friendly. None of those say much, but really. We read Laffy Taffy jokes, groaned about them, and came up with better punchlines. We discussed a math textbook. We all went around and talked about what we want out of the semester, which ranged from a senior trying to design his own major so that he can actually graduate ("I thought you were ECE?" "Well, officially, but I'm sure not going to meet those requirements.") to, well, me, just trying to figure everything out and enjoy my semester of Pass/No Record.

I truly just want to have an hour everyday like that lunch hour today.