Yesterday was a marathon day for me. That’s because I basically spent 13 hours or so on campus doing school stuff… reading and doing research for the three classes I attended yesterday (two of which I’m actually a student in, the third just for fun) and an afternoon meeting I had with one of my summer professors to discuss my research project/paper for his class.
I needed to spend the day doing exactly what I did… and honestly, I enjoyed every moment of the knowledge-soaking-up process. Still, when I got home around 10:45 and sat down to eat a small dinner, it only took a couple of minutes for me to realize just how exhausted I was.
The class I attended for fun last night was actually a crash course in math for political scientists. If I had been warned about the level of math knowledge I’d need for a political science degree, I would have seriously rethought my decision to start this program. I have always been able — even, some might argue, talented — at doing math problems; it helps that I am, it turns out, a highly analytical, linear thinker. But, math hurts my brain and doesn’t always work well considering my natural tendency to make stupid math errors, particularly when using a calculator.
Much of the math involved in the stuff I read nowadays is more statistical in nature than purely mathematical. I say that because most of it is highly applied and geared towards understanding data. In other words, it’s not math for math’s sake. However, in my grueling advanced stats class in the spring semester, there was a great deal of discussion about pure math concepts, things like matrix algebra, calculus, vectors, etc. I haven’t done calculus since my senior year of high school, and the rest of it probably never. I can’t remember a book I read last weekend, so I’m certainly not going to remember how to do calculus from high school.
Anyway, the class last night met for about 90 minutes and was basically a crash course in everything I need to know about calculus. There are five or six people in this class and they had all (presumably) read a couple of chapters of a math primer for social scientists and done some problems from there. I had done neither, and just showed up to listen in.
And OH. MY. GOD. Did it EVER make a difference. It didn’t remind me of what I learned in high school, but it did give me the distinct impression that I probably did learn that stuff in high school. It’s not so much that I remember, but rather that I remember that I once remembered. Anyway, the guy teaching this math course explained things so well, I now understand what a first and second derivative are doing, how to calculate a derivative, as well as several other shortcuts that I know are going to make my life SO much easier moving forward.
But honestly, if you’d asked me two days ago whether or not it was remotely possible for me to be excited about acquiring math knowledge, I probably would have burst out laughing. Who’d have thunk it?
In other (probably far more exciting, compared to math) news, Wednesday was my 29th birthday. I don’t mind turning 29, but I know there are others who are struggling with it (in particular, my mom, who is CLEARLY not old enough to have a 29-year-old daughter). It was a pretty low-key day, ending with dinner with Loren and Tammy; June 7 is also Tammy’s birthday, so it only makes sense for us all to celebrate together.