Math Follows Me Wherever I Go - Part II

As described in my previous and overly lengthy post, I have been having a love/fear relationship with math since I first started studying it in middle school. Despite my “stellar” performance and success in the said subject during my high school years, I never thought that either math or natural sciences were my thing. I was, after all, the only member of my family who chose to go into ‘humanities.” The undergraduate curriculum consisting of foreign languages, linguistics and Area Studies did not consist of any hard-core science or even a hint of math.

I did not think that I would ever have to deal with math again until I had to prepare for the GRE exam in order to apply to graduate school. Not having used any math whatsoever for almost a decade, I was faced with my childhood fear – I was not all that bright when it comes to math. Needless to say, I was horrified.

That particular period of my life can be described as a year long partying where I, as kindly noted by a recent commenter I was “drunk on Noy (locally bottled water), high on condensation and preoccupied with the few, the proud…” This, combined with my natural tendency to procrastinate was certainly the least favorable environment for preparing for the test. Knowing this I decided to hire a tutor, thinking that both the money and the time invested in studying in between bar hopping and strip clubbing would act as enough motivation to help me study. In as little as a couple of classes I not only realized that GRE math was not as hard as I thought it would be, but also rediscovered my long forgotten affinity for math. I also learned that when down and in distress, there is no better anti-depressant than a series of neat mathematical problems.

I took GRE prep courses for about a month and a half. My expectations were quite modest – I would be happy with a score anywhere within 680-700 range. Can you imagine my surprise when I found out that my score was in mid 700s for the quantitative part? Ironically, the verbal score was disappointingly low, but combined with the rest, I still ended up with a pretty decent average. I got accepted to graduate school. I got modest, but much needed partial scholarship. I was ecstatic. But I was more proud of my mad math skills than anything else.

After having taken the GRE and getting accepted to graduate school I thought, once again, that I would never have to deal with math. Fast forward three years and here I am with my decision to study Economics. Despite the fact that this particular decision has grown out of necessity and my combined interest in economic development and research/data analysis, it is also due to the fact that I really enjoy the subject. I also know that the courses that I will start taking come this fall require a strong background in mathematics. While this time around I didn’t freak out with the idea that I would have to know hard-core math in order to succeed in Econ, I was curious to find out where exactly it was that I stood when it came to college math. So for the past month or so I have been looking into this matter, as well as brushing up on my math skills. To my surprise, I discovered that I have not only already studied most of the concepts in high school, but I actually remembered most of them.

Last week, during my meeting with the department head, I found out that the program is especially designed around the said analytical skills and mathematical modeling, which was exactly what I lack and need to learn in order to be able to do the kind of stuff that I want to do.

“Here’s the tricky part though” I said to the department head. “I haven’t had any math courses in college.”

The department head rolled his eyes and chuckled. But before he would say anything, I quickly added:

“This doesn’t mean that I don’t know math though…”

“And how is that?” he asked.

I told him the redacted version of the facts that I laid out in this and previous posts. To my surprise, he actually took it pretty seriously. Turns out, they have had quite a few students from motherland to be able to fully appreciate the merits of the Soviet educational system when it comes to math.

“It seems like you guys get a master’s degree in mathematics in high school before you go on to study anything else.”

I told him that I would be willing to take any math placement tests that they would deem necessary. He said that I wouldn’t have to, given my GRE test scores, unless I wanted to be exempted from one of the prerequisite Calculus courses. I told him that I rather take the course before I move on to anything more advanced. He said that he appreciated my rigor.

So here it is, kids, my saga of math that looks nowhere close to being ended. And frankly, I am quite excited about it. In case you were wondering as to what I have been up to for the last month or so, picture me at a desk solving math problems for hours at a time, sometimes not leaving the house for several days and actually being happy about it. After all, I do enjoy math. I think it’s neat and fun and cool any way I look at it. I may not be bright enough to solve probability problems at the age of eight, I may not be apt enough to tackle linear algebra and real analysis quite yet, as long as I remember that one way of getting good at it is not being afraid, I think I will be just fine.

Math Follows Me Wherever I Go

Note: This post is partly inspired by the following that I read a few weeks ago over at The Upside of Entropy. By the way, this link is supposed to tell you whether you’re right-brained or left brained. Although at first my little dancer was turning counter-clockwise, it stopped and started turning clock-wise after a couple of minutes. I am not sure what that means. Another multiple choice test kindly informed me that I use 55% of my left brain and 45% of my right brain, if you were wondering. Did I tell you that I simply hate taking multiple choice tests in general? Mostly because my answer usually does not fit neatly into any of the listed categories. But judging by the results I am more left-brained than right-brained, which means that I use logic, base my decisions on facts, am supposedly good at math and sciences, like order, form strategies, have a good sense of reality and am an overall pretty rational human being.

I am not sure how accurate this little number is, but the fact that it finds me left-brained comes as a bit of a surprise. If someone asked me what my best attributes were, rationality and logic would probably not be at the top of my list. See, I do not have the best track record for being “rational.” I’ve been known for making pretty irrational decisions throughout my life – even if they sort of made sense to me, my justifications were too twisted, skewed and far-fetched to even remotely resemble rational. You can get a flavor of it in an angry rant that I wrote to myself a couple of years ago. However, I will leave the element of rationality when it comes to adult real life decisions aside, and go back to the subject matter of left-brainedness at hand and apply it to my love/fear relationship with mathematics.

I was born into a family of scientists (my dad was a physicist, my mother is a biologist, my brother is a programmer, one of my grandmothers was a math teacher, I have an uncle who’s a doctor of chemistry, etc., etc.). Needless to say, my parents made a special effort to develop my “scientific” reasoning. I have been exposed to natural sciences since early childhood. See, at the age of five I knew more about insects and electricity than your average high schooler. My obsession with butterflies and cosmology comes from the early years of my formation as well. What does it have to do with math, you might ask? Well, having a physicist as a father would be one. And like all physicists that I’ve known in my entire life (and I’ve known quite a few – after all, my dad had many physicist friends alike), my father was obsessed with math and firmly believed that the best way of testing one’s intelligence was to give them a test in math. I am not going to argue for or against this belief – I am bringing this up merely to show you how highly math was valued in my family.

So my dad had this habit of giving me neat mathematical puzzles to solve – sometimes at dinner table, sometimes on the way to and from school. Some of these puzzles were on probabilities, which as an eight year old, I wasn’t able to solve. So my dad, jokingly and lovingly would mention that I am not all that bright after all. While I know that my dad was doing it merely to tease me and get my “mathematical” mind working, I think this was one and only and probably the worst pedagogical move he had ever made while bringing me up. It gave a complex - I am not all that bright when it comes to math. Well, I do have to admit that I am not as bright as either my dad or my brother when it comes to math (we’re talking genius here). And math geniuses have a certain way of thinking – they think in numbers, formulas, functions, whatever. That’s not how I think. Actually for a while I was pretty obsessed as to how exactly it was that I thought – that is whether I thought in concepts or words – but after having spent five years supposedly studying linguistics, I still haven’t found an answer to my question. But that’s a different topic that I won’t get into here – those who might have something to contribute are welcome to comment away.

Back to math – as an eight-year-old confused with probability problems I thought that math wasn’t my thing. I was good with words. I wrote pretty good essays even when in middle school, I knew how to speak well and speak impressively. But, given the fact that my primary Soviet education was pretty rigorous, with strong concentration on math and sciences, I did pretty well in those subjects as well. I loved biology. I really liked physics and chemistry. I got straight As in algebra and geometry. Until I decided to switch from English advanced school to math advanced school when I reached high school, mainly because my mother used to teach there, I had friends there and liked the teachers better. Needless to say, my childhood complex came back - I was horrified of not doing well in math (by that time we were covering trigonometry, spatial geometry and derivative calculus). Although my mother thought that my fears were ungrounded, she decided that it would be a good idea to ask one of my dad’s friends who was preparing students for college entrance math exams at the time to tutor me as well.[*]

So I started studying math with my dad’s friend, who was not only the best math teacher one could ever wish for, but was also one of the most patient and humble people that I have ever met. Besides building a solid foundation that helped me understand pretty complex mathematical concepts, he taught me the most important lesson that I could ever learn – if you want to be good at math you must not fear it. “Both you and me are people of average capabilities” he would tell me “one way of getting good at math is to practice enough.” I guess he was right, because I not only overcame my math phobia, but ended up really loving it to an extent that it would give me a high. I would look at a logarithmic equation and automatically picture its function in my head. Trigonometry came to me as a breeze. I thought derivative were cool. I thought math in general was cool. In the matter of several months we managed to finish the entire math high school curriculum and bragging aside, I was the best student in math in my new math advanced school, granted that a lot of the students had math tutors besides school as well.

My love affair with math ended shortly afterwards, since I spent my senior year as an exchange student in Northern Michigan. Because I had more math and science courses than I needed to graduate, I decided to take courses that I couldn’t take at home – like journalism, creative writing, economics, psychology –all the fun stuff.

I graduated high school and returned home barely making it on time for college entrance exams. Here I was faced with a dilemma –I was gone all year and didn’t “prepare” for the entrance exams and the only ones that I could handle were foreign language exams. I had two options – take a year off, study math and apply to School of Economics at Yerevan State, or take the said English exams and go to the Institute of Foreign Languages, which was shortly afterwards renamed as State University of Linguistics. By that time I had a pretty advanced knowledge of English, spoke the language fluently and both oral and written exams were pretty much a breeze. Besides, one thing that I liked more than anything else was the English language and was afraid that if I didn’t give myself an opportunity to use the language on a regular basis, I would soon forget it. At that time good knowledge of English was a highly marketable skill in Armenia and soon enough it landed me not only with my first teaching job, but with series of pretty darn important translating contracts that as an eighteen-year-old I was very proud of.

Needless to say, math was not a subject taught at the School of Linguistics. And let me also say that the five years spent in that school were not the most challenging thing that I ever had to accomplish. Actually, as sad as this sounds, up to this day, together with my recent graduate experience, I do not think that I have ever been as challenged or had to work harder than I did in … high school. I had long forgotten my love affair with math. I hardly went to class past my third year. I had a real job with a microfinance organization. I did translations on the side. I was super busy and math was the last thing that I thought about. Frankly, I never thought I would ever need to use math again besides everyday basic arithmetic. Little did I know that I was going to be proved wrong…

Given the length of this post, I am going to cut it off. The second part will be coming shortly, given the fact that soon enough math is going to acquire special relevance in the field of study that I am choosing to get into.

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[*] As a side note, college entrance exams in Armenia up to this day are not standardized. Depending on the specialty of choice, students must take whatever exam is required for that particular department. For example, kids who want to go to medical school take an exam in chemistry and either physics and biology. Engineering schools require kids to take an exam in math and physics. Language schools require oral and written exam in the language of choice, and so on and so forth.

To Whom It May Concern: It’s Eighty Degrees and Sunny. A Lovely Richmond Afternoon

And I’m happily complacent like I haven’t been in a while.

My meeting with people at Econ department at VCU a couple of days ago went very extremely well. While sitting down with the admissions people to discuss the application process and all my related questions was very informative, the highlight of my visit was an “informal” interview with the department head who apparently has a lot of say in the admissions process.

The department head turned out to be a pretty cool guy. He straightforwardly informed me that one thing the program doesn’t teach is how to write policies. “It’s a highly political and speculative process that we don’t get involved in” he said. “Brandeis would be a much better fit for you – they’re really good at it up there.” I told him that despite the fact that I find policies extremely interesting, it is not what I am looking to learn or else I would be applying to policy programs. “It’s mushy science,” I said. “I think I have had enough of that already.” What I would like to do is to be involved in research on the impact of such policies and if I want to as much as get close to that sort of stuff, I will need a background in economics with very strong quantitative skills. “We can teach you that” he smiled. “You’ll get more training in econometrics and mathematical modeling than you could ever dream about. And some theory, of course.” I told him that it was exactly what I was looking for.

Needless to say, I truly liked the guy. There is something about middle aged Southern men that I am helplessly attracted to – must be the Southern drawl and the sense of humor that I find easy to play along with. They usually end up liking me back. I tend to think that there is more to it than my pretty eyes. Whatever it is, the guy told me that my chances of getting admitted were pretty high and even hinted that if I hurried up and got my stuff in soon enough, there would be a good possibility that I’d receive funding. I left his office giddy with excitement. And a mental list of stuff that I need to do to get the application processes started.

In a few more days my extended Passover break will be over and I will be heading back to the Bean Town for the last time. The following two weeks will be insanely busy. Besides the load of assignments that need to be turned in by the end of the semester, I will need to submit the application to VCU, fill out the paperwork related to taking a leave of absence at Brandeis, take care of bunch of bureaucratic procedures necessary for my summer trip, as well as clean and pack my belongings and move them back to Richmond. I will be leaving the States in the end of May. There is a week long training that I need to attend in D.C., adding an extra task of finding accommodation in D.C. On top of that, since the boy and I decided to share a roof together after I get back, there will be a need to search for the said roof as well.

Despite the overwhelmingly long list of stuff that must be taken care of within the next month, I am pretty happy. After all, these are tasks to get excited about. I’ll be finally done with Brandeis, get to go home, and come back to Richmond to start a new and exhilarating learning experience, move in with the boy. All in all, things are playing themselves out pretty darn well. For now all I can do is enjoy the few free days and the gorgeous weather in Richmond and bask in this feeling of utter complacency, since there is not a single thing that I can think of to be complaining about.

Spilling the beans

“Just because I don’t have a background in something, doesn’t mean that I can’t potentially get it…”

As obvious as this statement is, it took a mini-epiphany of sorts to finally see the “obvious.” However, it wasn’t one of these ground shaking moments with skies opening up and blinding light pouring down on me, but a rather calm realization, as I sat in front of my computer day after day, browsing job listings.

I am considering getting a second degree in Economics. Despite the fact that my “inconsistencies” are well known (and well documented in this blog), despite the fact that I have a tendency to get excited over a wide array of topics and disciplines, this is not a passing whim of mine, but quite a logical decision that I came to gradually. I need to learn economics because economic development is what I am most interested in. I need to have a good working knowledge in economics, since every job that truly interests me requires such background. I need to know economics if I want to carry out work of certain kind of depth and magnitude that gets me giddy with excitement. I do need that background if I ever decide to get a PhD (which most likely be somewhat related to Public Policy). I also want to learn economics simply because I truly enjoy the subject, even if my exposure to it up to this day has been rather limited.

So for the last month or so I have been thinking about every little aspect that this decision contains and trying to find out as much information as I can about what studying economics entails and where I should go to study it. Since then I have met with my advisor a couple of times, talked to a number of professors, PhD students and administration at Brandeis and elsewhere, discussed it with family and friends. And despite certain quite legitimate reservations that some of them expressed, the amount of support that I received has been incredible. It makes sense, any way I look at it.

Now comes the question regarding where to go to study it. One thing I am certain about is that I do not want to be at Brandeis anymore – I think I am done with Brandeis for the time being. At the same time, if I rather not lose any more time and start this fall, I have missed the deadlines of many programs that would be more or less appealing. And since the only place I would rather be at this point is Richmond, and that Virginia Commonwealth University is located in Richmond, I decided to take a look at what it has to offer. And what do you know – its business school does offer a degree in Economics. Master’s degree, that is. On top of that, the school has a rolling admission (the deadline for turning in an application for fall isn’t until July), is relatively inexpensive (it’s a public school after all) and chances are I will qualify for in-state tuition. Given the fact that both my GPA and average GRE score are higher than VCU average, and given the fact that I scored ridiculously high on the quantitative part of GRE (surprising, since I am, after all, and English major) and these are scores that would count most, chances are I will get accepted. Also, another curious fact – VCU ranks higher in Economics than… Brandeis. Not that I’m concerned about rankings anyway (more on that will come later, I suppose).

Next week I am meeting with the admissions people at VCU to discuss what it is going to take to get accepted into the program. I do know that I will have to take a few undergraduate courses (including Calculus) before I could move on to graduate ones. And although I have a rough estimate that the whole process will take about two years, I will know for sure after I meet with them.

What happens with Brandies then, you might want to know? As much as I would like to say “whatever” and “screw it,” I did, after all, invest tremendous amount of resources (and time) into my current degree program. I am also about to finish all academic requirements for the said degree. Quitting the program this late in the game would not be all that great of an idea, after all. For now, the tentative plan is that if I get accepted to the program, or get the green light to start the undergraduate courses, I will take a leave of absence from Brandeis, get a degree and training in economics, which in its turn will allow me to get a job out of which I will write a thesis for Brandeis. I do realize that I am taking the longest possible option that I could ever choose to finally get a degree in International Development. But at the same time, I think the process is well worth it, especially since it will leave me with two degrees that will nicely complement each other. And since, as one of my dear friends kindly pointed out to me that the only people who hire “development professionals” without quantitative or economics background are Peace Corps (those who know me know what I think about Peace Corps) I think I am making a sound decision. An added bonus - high marketability of Economics degree that will give me a whole lot of options besides running around the world and trying to accommodate one stubborn donor or greedy consultant at a time.

When I close my eyes, I can actually smell the spring in the air.

It’s April. Slowly, veeery slowly spring is making its way to my whereabouts. Still bundled up in warm clothes, I shiver every time I see undergrads walking around bare legged in flip-flops. For me it’s still cold, still too unpleasant…

Last time I was in Richmond (which was a month ago) trees were covered with blossoms everywhere. Not a single sign of a flower anywhere in the vicinity here, but when I close my eyes, even on coldest days, I can actually smell the spring in the air.

Lately I’ve been in quite a happy mood. I realize that I have a little more than a month left here. I also decided to take the fellowship offer, which means that great part of my summer will be spent in the Caucasus. I am excited about the trip. I am ecstatic about the fact that I will be seeing my family soon, getting to spend some time at home. Then, come August, and I will be moving back to Richmond - my second home, or as I like to put it, my home by choice, to (hopefully) start classes at Virginia Commonwealth University – a decision that I will talk more about in the next couple of posts.

For those who have noticed, Day In The World is currently running under “Graduate Edition” – a title that I put up there for the fun of it, thinking to myself that it won’t be too long until I take it off again. Now I come to realize that it is here to stay for quite a while longer, about which I am also very excited.

So now I am starting my (grand) countdown until it’s time for me to leave. But before I leave, I think I should devote some time (and space in this blog) to reflect upon the events that happened during the first year of graduate studies at Brandeis and how these events affected the decisions that I am about to make. Despite the fact that this year at Brandeis has not been the best one that I’ve ever had, I think some good has come out of it nonetheless and the least I can do is to as much as account for it.

For now, only one more month…