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This is what happens when a mathematician tries to write poetry.
About Me
- Lynet
- Actually, I like parabolas best, but ellipses and hyperbolas are good, too. 'Lynet' is my favourite spelling of Thomas Malory's 'Damosel Sauvage', from my favourite re-telling of the story.
Blogroll
- An Apostate's Chapel
- Bridging Schisms
- Chromium Oxide Green
- Dangerous Intersection
- Daylight Atheism
- Digital Cuttlefish
- Evolutionary Middleman
- Greta Christina's Blog
- Higgaion
- Intrinsically Knotted
- JD2718
- Letters from a broad...
- Masculinity and its Discontents
- No More Hornets
- Pharyngula
- PoemShape
- Seedlings in Stone
- The Greenbelt
- This is you reading about me ... or not.
- Wild About Math
11 comments:
Just popping in to say hi. Is that, like, something people can do at a Humanist Symposium? :)
Hi back. I've had exams recently, so I'm a little wiped out, but it's always nice to hear fom you.
How were your exams? And, were they your finals for a B.A. degree, or for an M.Sc., or what?
I can't actually say what sort of degree without revealing my location. Which tells you something to begin with, but never mind. But let's call it roughly speaking a masters and leave it at that.
I suspect it went terribly. However, one of the lecturers here did badly on this course, so it's not the end of the world; I should still be able to get a good PhD place somewhere whatever happens.
I really need to make sure I blog under the assumption that the pseudonym is eventually only going to be good for Google purposes. Ah, well.
Pseudonym... oh! So I am not talking to Lynet? What a strange thing to think that I know not to whom I speak (blog).
I had just come by to wish you well on the exams you took, but I see you are disappointed. Okay, I will simply wish you well.
Sorry! Yes, it's a pseudonym. I should probably make that clear on my 'About Me' page, I suppose.
I suspected one of my finals this semester went terribly, too, but I still got a passing grade (the class was pass/fail, so I was spared knowing what kind of passing grade I got).
Where are you applying for a Ph.D.? In the US universities send out notices of admission or rejection in February and March, and the deadline for accepting an offer is 4/15.
I'm going to have to wait a year; I've had funding troubles this time around which have convinced me that I really do need to apply to American places as well as British ones. I might have to see which universities will let me speed through the PhD coursework, given the graduate work that I've done already.
Mine won't, but unless you're into mathematical physics, topology/geometry, or number theory/algebraic geometry, you have no reason to apply here. I'm pretty sure neither will Berkeley.
But Harvard will let you take your quals right when you get there, and I think Princeton will let you take them in May of your first year. Both of those places try to make you graduate in four years or even fewer; Noam Elkies went to Harvard straight from college, and got a Ph.D. in two years. About the other places I've applied to I don't remember anymore.
I did both a MS and a PhD and certainly recommend going straight into the PhD with the MS if you can manage it.
If this is your MS you're working on, then what you may find is that the PhD program will accept the classes, at least many of them, but will still make you take all of their core curriculum - at least in most of the US schools.
We have residency requirements for how long students must matriculate at the specific location of the university before they are allowed to graduate. It's probably (being a bit cynical about these things) a financial issue driving it - but it was always explained to me as a way for the university to assure itself, by keeping students a certain length of time, that who they turned out would continue to uphold the reputation of the university.
Perhaps your exams will have a better outcome than you feel - I know I left a few over the years that I was quite sure I had failed only to find out that I had, in fact, done quite well. I think it's all part of the humbling experience that Grad school is all about.
Good success to you - whoever and wherever you are.
It's not quite an MS... If it's what I think it is, then US universities won't formally recognize it. I know a few Americans who intend to do that degree on a scholarship and then come back, because they don't care about a one year delay in graduation if it allows them to spend some time in Britain on someone else's dime.
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