One Year of Grad School

One year of grad school down, ~4 to go. It’s been one heck of a time. These are some of the things I did, in no particular order:

  • Taught over a hundred students, on paper

  • Taught maybe forty or sixty students who actually showed up to section, in practice

  • Learned more about teaching than I could have done in a lifetime of reading the manual

  • Went on strike

  • Met a girl on the picket line

  • Got ghosted

  • Learned to love linear algebra, again

  • Met a few of the dragons that exist in the abyss between “What you think is important” and “What your advisor thinks is important”

  • Joined five different Bible study groups, only one of which turned out to be a cult

  • Joined the Graduate Assembly

  • Learned to play Bridge

  • Went on a ten-hour hike with two other mathematicians and a law student, culminating in a visit to a beach that can only be reached as the halfway point of a ten-hour hike

  • Got illegally evicted

  • Protested the UC’s poor treatment of other protesters

  • Somehow managed to avoid getting a union t-shirt

  • Vaguely regretted this at a number of moments

  • Built The Team from Turtle Bay, my all-time favorite software project ever

  • Met a bunch of lovely folks at Lawrence Berkeley Lab

  • Bought a bike

  • Broke the chain and the shifters on my bike in separate incidents

  • Learned to cook beans Cuban style

  • Learned to slow-cook meat

  • Remembered how much I liked cooking in general

  • Cooked a Violet Beauregarde and kebapi

  • Bought a new computer with a powerful graphics card because I need it for doing linear algebra

  • Immediately devoted that graphics card entirely to gaming

  • Attended two different weddings, one Catholic and one Protestant, and wore the same suit to both, thereby proving that ecumenism has a future

  • Graded one final exam for nine straight hours

  • Watched the Perseids

  • Learned how to air up a car tyre

  • Helped two friends, both coincidentally named after apostles, to move an antique gas stove into the apartment of a woman who owned somewhere between five and fifteen parrots

  • Played through the entire original Ace Attorney trilogy in two weeks and then felt absolutely no urge to ever touch it again

  • Fully embraced my love of puns

  • Learned to live without any hair

  • Googled en passant

What can I say?

Holy hell.

Written on August 23, 2023