It's earlier than I normally start writing reflection posts, but this one covers the entire school year, not just this semester, and everything is in project mode now. This is all about math related things -- NINJAing, online assisting, graph theory, and Putnam!
NINJA
I was a course assistant for Discrete Math and Linearity II in the fall. NINJAing was a huge time sink -- I usually came close to the maximum 15 hours per week -- but I really enjoyed it. Even though both courses were math classes, they aren't similar at all. Homework for Discrete Math was mostly proofs, so when I graded, comments were far more important than numerical grades. The graded portion of the Linearity II homework, though, was almost entirely numerical calculations, so I was grading for correctness and rarely wrote comments. Even NINJA hours were different for the two classes. Linearity NINJA hours usually involved clarifying problems or explaining concepts that people hadn't understood very well in lecture. In Discrete NINJA hours, the help I gave was more reasoning-focused. Students would go through the basic outlines of their proofs with me, or I would prompt them and give hints if they were stuck somewhere in a proof.
Both of these are fall only classes, and I plan to study away next fall, so my next opportunity to NINJA either of these classes will be my senior year.
In the spring, I NINJAed Modeling with Probabilities (ModProb) and Linearity I. For most of the semester, I wasn't putting in nearly so many hours per week as in the fall because Linearity involved no grading, and grading for ModProb was much faster than grading for Discrete.
Linearity I was taught with minimal lecture as opposed to having one full day of lecture like last year. Within each of the three studios some amount of lecture happened, especially after there was a lot of initial resistance to pure discovery-based problem sets, but how much framing there was varied a lot by studio/professor. The difference among studios is by far the biggest problem with Linearity this semester.
ModProb was a four credit class fulfilling the probability and statistics requirement, and it was being taught for the first time. ModProb has been a bit of an adventure in terms of not always knowing where the class is going and what the pace should be. We went all the way through discrete probability first and then did continuous probability really quickly so that people could move into final projects. The goal of the final projects is to show applications, and they started too late to be really useful in that sense. The professor is a visitor who will probably be gone next year, so we don't know whether something like this class will be taught again.
Art of Problem Solving Assisting
I assisted lots of AoPS classes this fall, but I always had one on Tuesday and one on Thursday. My Thursday class changed partway through the semester, which is how I ended up with lots of classes while assisting only twice a week. I started off as a Mathcounts/AMC 8 Basics assistant and later moved over to Prealgebra 1. My Tuesday class was Geometry. I also subbed for a wide variety of classes, including Java Programming with Data Structures, an intermediate level programming course.
That Geometry class lasted through early April, and when Prealgebra 1 ended in February I picked up another Geometry class on Thursdays. I also subbed a lot this spring, especially in March, and I was a regular sub for several classes. I TAed Intro to Counting and Probability for the first time. That was really exciting for because once upon a time it was my first AoPS class, and it definitely inspired my lasting love of combinatorics. I was also asked to assist for the AIME II Math Jam. AIME is an annual math competition which I took for all four years of high school. It has 15 problems, and while my last year I did well, I never got an amazing score, so I was really nervous about TAing for the Math Jam, which went over solutions to all the problems. The three hours of assisting went really well, though, which made me so happy.
Graph Theory Research
This was a fun year of research! I did my first peer review for a journal, we submitted three papers, and Jacques and I presented at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore this month. One of the papers we submitted was really short, and we ended up submitting it to a couple of journals that accepted such short papers, but it was rejected for not being a good fit. We've wrapped up a lot of things that we looked into a bit last fall, so we're looking to move into new topics for next year.
Jacques and I presented at Expo together. We used the slides that we later used for the Joint Math Meetings, so in some ways it was practice, but Expo was really a very different presentation because of the different audience. At Olin, we were presenting to a more general technical community, and in Baltimore we presented to (mostly) other graph theorists who are working on similar problems. At the Joint Meetings, some professors whose papers we cited came to our presentations, as well as professors from Babson, some of my friends, and a couple of people with whom I had really cool conversations later.
I also did a poster presentation at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Math. The poster presentation went really well, but the rest of the conference was pretty mixed. I saw some interesting math presentations, but there were a lot of presentations, panels, and discussions about grad school, industry, etc., and I didn't get a lot out of that. I've spent a fair bit of time with math grad students, so that was just something with which I was more familiar. For a lot of the other students I met, though, it was more useful.
Putnam
Putnam was a lot of fun this year! A big group of us took the exam and all went out to lunch together. My score was pretty comparable to last year, which I expected. I was one of two Olin students who tied for 333rd, and two others tied for 597th, I think. As a team we got 26th place, which we're really excited about as a school that doesn't have a real math major.
Midnight Math
Midnight Math took awhile to get started this semester, but the handful of talks were all fantastic. I also gave one! (Took me long enough.) I talked about graphs called snarks and how they embed on different surfaces. One of my favorite graph theory courses at Mathcamp a few years ago was Graphs on Surfaces, and I was inspired by some conversations I'd had about the Petersen graph as well as sarah-marie belcastro's talk at the Joint Meetings. There were several fun post-Midnight Math conversations this semester. Said conversations resulted in me staying up far too late, but they were worth it. Math-y people are fantastic.
No comments:
Post a Comment