Post by Bannanachair on Jan 29, 2024 5:30:40 GMT -4
I mentioned this in response to Danny's thread, but this forum is the perfect place for screaming into the void. It's a bunch of childhood friends who've known me for over half my life, and yet simultaneously a collection of total strangers who don't know me at all.
I've posted a few life updates here, but they've all been fairly odd snippets. Five years ago, I was struggling to decide where to go to college. I wound up making the wrong choice, in retrospect. I've documented some of my time in college here, here and here. I ranted about some dark things here, and I think I'm going to pick up from there.
The life-story that I described then is essentially accurate. I left out why I moved in with my dad in 2018, but also, I think I got the timeline wrong. I think I was living with my dad from mid-2016 on, after I ran away from home because my mother was violently, physically and emotionally abusive. I was living with my dad for about a year before I entered into the relationship I mentioned. I used colourful language to dance around the point because it was recent enough that it bothered me, but it's far enough in the past that I can just say that I was raped repeatedly, gaslit and occasionally hit by my first girlfriend. It was not a fun time, and it screwed with my head to the point where my timeline on my life essentially before college is murky.
I don't remember finding out that my maternal grandfather had schizophrenia. It seems possible - he once told me how to escape from a mental institution when I was a kid, and with retrospect I think he was a crank with some interesting ideas on quantum gravity. He passed away in 2016, though, so I can't easily go and ask him, and for some reason I disbelieve it.
I "graduated highschool" in December 2018. In retrospect, I'm not sure whether I actually did. I went on a stage and got a piece of paper that says that I did, yes. But I also went to a small, private special education school. I was the only student in the school graduating highschool; I think at that point I was one of only two students doing highschool-level coursework. With retrospect I'm not convinced that the school was accredited to give highschool diplomas or anything that an American institution would recognize as being equivalent, no matter how good the highschool teacher (singular) was. I did standardized exams to make up for that - first the Singapore O levels, then the British AS levels, and then I lied to college admissions and said that AS levels were the same as A levels. I don't know how I pulled that one off.
I spent the next 6 months living with my paternal grandfather in Myrtle Beach, SC. He was a good guy, and those 6 months were some of the best of my life. Family drama wasn't a thing when it was just the two of us; RPF drama had ended before that. He unfortunately passed away a year and a half ago near the start of my senior year of college after a long battle with dementia and cancer.
I started college in Fall 2019. It's odd that, when I was a kid, I never understood nor used American educational terms, but I am now fully immersed in them. Even little things like "differential calculus" and "integral calculus" as course names as opposed to their actual names, "calculus I" and "calculus II". I made one group of friends, got very drunk and depressed and then scared them off, essentially as I described in my "egos and delusions of grandeur" thread. I wound up making other friends, and various bits of nonsensical drama ensued.
Covid was not fun. I was diagnosed with Bipolar II just before it started, and I was put on zoloft and then when that didn't work for me, seroquel. Seroquel fucked with me badly. I was so heavily sedated that I could barely think when I was awake, and I was sleeping 18 hours a day. In one of my aforementioned threads I mentioned that I'd started medicine that I didn't like; I wound up quitting it, and I've never seen a headshrinker again. Online classes also messed with me and fucked with my grades; just about the only thing I did well during the pandemic was math.
The other big change in my life around college was that I stopped using a phone. Around the time I had my falling out with my friends and my severe depressive episode, I found that I despised phones. I hated the fact that they were constantly tracking you at all times; I hated the crappier phone website designs; I hated the social expectation of being always constantly available. So, in late 2019 I threw my phone in the lake and haven't owned a smartphone since then. Whether it was a flash of insight as to our dystopian hell-world or a severe psychotic break or just me attempting to be weird and quirky and interesting, I'm still unsure.
I suppose it's also noteworthy that I picked up some substances. Drinking was something I'd done since I was young; my journey into drinking is well-documented here. I picked up smoking cigarettes from one of my best friends at the time, and then picked up chainsmoking from my best friend from my summer job. (Or maybe we descended into chainsmoking together). I also started doing adderall a little over a year ago; not legally, but through various dealers. It helps me focus on schoolwork and be highly productive.
There was debate team drama that felt extremely important at the time and which I now barely remember, even a couple years later. There was drama in the house that I lived in for two years that felt extremely important at the time and which I now barely remember, less than a year out. When I was a kid I thought that I was highly sentimental; when I moved in with my dad and left Teddy (my childhood Teddy Bear) behind, I thought that all my youthful sentimentality had gone away. When I was assaulted, I thought that that altered my ability to remember things significantly far back. I think nowadays that none of these are right, and I just have a "locational memory" or "circumstantial memory". Essentially, imagine going to a summer camp and having a great time, then going to school for a year. If you go back to that same summer camp, all those memories will come back and will feel recent and relevant, even if they've been overshadowed by other things for a year. Especially with events that feel highly modular, with a clear start and end and little interaction with my life outside - maybe that's why I struggle to remember the past so much. If I were to visit Singapore and see all those people I used to know again, maybe all my memories would come rushing back to me. Or maybe not.
There are a few things from my time in undergrad that I remember quite well, and that I think I will continue to remember. I was a math major and heavily involved with the department; I grew rather close to my professors. I am rather fond of them, and hope to visit sometime. There was almost no drama; the one bit that there was still weighs heavily on my mind over a year later. I also left with a number of strong friendships still intact, though it's somewhat shocking how quickly I've lost contact with some of them despite my best efforts. As though out of a storybook, I wound up reconnecting with my original first-year friendgroup near the end. Things sort of came full circle; I grew and matured a lot as a person. I went from being arrogant and full of myself to hating and despising myself to being at peace, part of a community that welcomed and accepted me.
Anyway, all that character development has since fallen by the wayside, but I'll elaborate on that later. There are two other important, non-college things that have been ongoing parts of my life since 2021 and 2022. First, I've found another online community to be a part of. This online community is one of talented math students who push themselves to excel in the subject - the youngest are 14-year-old child savants studying algebraic topology, but the majority are either highly dedicated undergraduates or grad students; there's at least two postdocs in that online community. I don't think I'm ever going to leave behind having online communities. The websites may change and the topics of conversation may change and the dynamics may change and the people may change, but I suspect it's something that I'll always do.
I actually met up with some people I met online. From here, I met Lego in real life while I was traveling to my summer job. I've since met five other people from the internet; one became a coworker at my summer job, one goes to the same grad school as me and one is their partner. Real life meetups have an interesting track-record - some of them wind up being awkward, while other times they exceed all expectations. I definitely think that the dynamics are always different in real life than online. That might be why I have such a hard time keeping in touch with people from real life over the internet, too, aside from the times that the online communication exceeds all expectations.
The next important ongoing(-ish) part of my life is my summer job. I worked at a summer camp for gifted young mathematicians in Indiana. (Oddly enough, my bosses name was Tim - this is not my real life name, and I have not gone by it in years. So now what was once my name I associate with someone else far more strongly than myself). Some of my coworkers from there also became close friends. All that said, it's arguable that this is also a blurring of the line between real-life and online-life. One of my coworkers last year was an internet friend first (and I told him about the job and to apply), one of my coworkers from last year has become integrated into part of my online friend group. I'm working on getting another online friend to apply. Plus, it's all math, and math is a very small world.
Before we go to the present, I'm going to take an aside and talk about my sexual orientation and love-life. For quite a long while as a kid and very early twentysomething, I thought that I was asexual and aromantic. My third year of undergrad I realized that I was not aromantic, and had a crush on someone whom I asked out. (I was rejected). A little over a year later, during a week-long absinthe/reading-a-textbook bender over thanksgiving break with a friend from the math department, I learned that I was not asexual. That said, I do quite hate short-term flings for the emotional aftereffects. I suspect nowadays that I'm bidemisexual and bidemiromantic, but had internalized homophobia that made me think I couldn't be attracted to men, and because what I was feeling towards some guy friends (especially Lucas) couldn't possibly be attraction those same feelings towards women also couldn't possibly be attraction.
At my summer-camp last summer (in my second year of working there), I had another week-long fling, this time with a coworker who was theoretically a lesbian. She said that it was just physical and not romantic, because she wasn't romantically interested in men; I accepted that, and moved on. She later got a boyfriend, which makes me feel rather jealous, even though there are plenty of other reasons that a long-distance relationship between grad students just wouldn't work out.
Between my undergrad math department, my online math community, my math-related summer job and the three different math people I wanted to have relationships with but didn't, my self-esteem improved significantly. I cut back a bit on the self-deprecation; I go months without a stray suicidal thought. I feel secure and confident in my place in the world in a way that I really never have before, and I'm optimistic about the future. These are all good things. However, with this, I've noticed that a bit of my old ego is coming back, in a more mature and more subtle form, and I'm not sure how much I like that. I think I was actually a better person when I was a self-loathing mess. I was weirdly more confident when I thought everyone hated me than now when I'm awkwardly trying to get people to like me. And the self-hatred helped keep me humble and mitigated my superiority complex.
In the three weeks after my summer-camp ended, but before I started the next chapter of my life, I was in a sort of liminal in-between stage of life. I saw clearly for the first time in four years how self-contained my college experience was. In some ways, I felt similarly to how I did when I lived in Myrtle Beach with my grandfather, or the winter I spent with my grandmother in New Jersey when I was ten, being in-between things and being able to step away from them and look at them more big-picture. It was an interesting experience, and one I likely won't have again until about 2028. In a sense I think that that's the "real me"; if college me was me playing the part in college and summer-camp-me was me playing the part in summer camp and internet-me was me playing the part online, that was the version of me that went backstage to change my makeup between scenes.
All this brings me, finally, to where I am now. In August, I started my PhD in mathematics at a prestigious midwestern university. It is the beginning of something new, but also in some sense what my life has been building towards since I was five years old and wanted to be an astronaut.
First, the academics. When I lived in Singapore, highschool was intense. It was constant work and studying for a set of exams that felt like they would determine the course of my life. When I moved to the US and started college, the intensity dropped a bit. There was one thing in undergrad that required some amount of intensity, my honours project, but by that point I hadn't been in the habit of hard work for so long that I wasn't able to complete it. Right now, I'm in a state of constant work and studying for a set of exams that feel like they're going to determine the course of my life. (Specifically, these are qualifying exams).
Teaching is a very interesting experience. I'm not teaching anything too serious at school; I run discussion sections for essentially business-major precalculus. It's a thankless job, and far less fun than the teaching that I did at my summer camp. Grading is especially annoying. To make up for how boring I find the content that I'm teaching, I decided to start teaching a free, online course in real analysis, which seems to be going quite well. But it's also a bunch of extra work that I decided to give myself for no reason whatsoever, at a time in my life when I really shouldn't be putting things like that onto myself.
The community here is interesting. Despite being at what's technically a much bigger school than my undergrad, I'm in a smaller environment - I don't really interact socially with people who aren't other math grad students. I have a few friends in my cohort, and a few friends in cohorts above me. That said, at times, I feel like there's a sociable grad-student clique that I'm not a part of, not invited to, not welcome in. I'm finding interacting with people awkward in a way that I didn't really before. With very few exceptions, my acquaintanceships are taking remarkably long to turn into real friendships. The one exception in my cohort is my friend who I often get lunch with - interestingly, this is how I became close friends with my best friend from undergrad. I feel like lunches are a good way to be friends with people, and I'll keep that in the future moving forward.
I feel like my approach to math is very different than when I was an undergrad. As an undergrad, I quickly depleted all the math courses and tried to just take whatever I could. Now that I have access to all the math courses in the world, I am a lot more picky. I quickly learned that algebraic topology is not for me, for example. Conversely, I've fallen in with the analysis group quite quickly; I attend the operator theory seminar regularly, I participated in a reading seminar last semester, and all of this on top of my ordinary coursework. The analysis professors are also all super nice and supportive; I hope that my relationship with this research group will be similar to my relationship with the entire math department where I was an undergrad. There are three professors in particular that I want to work with, and that I'm having a hard time deciding between to pick as my advisor.
I'm living on my own and fully financially independently, finally. Through undergrad I worked (especially over the summer), but I didn't cover every expense myself - I had help from my dad with paying tuition. As a grad student, I don't live a life of luxury, but I get a good enough stipend to afford a shitty apartment with cockroaches and food and utilities and the occasional night out. My shoes are worn to all hell and my laptop is falling apart, but it's better than nothing. And despite the fact that any economist would claim my standard of living has declined significantly, the freedom I now have is more than worth it.
My relationship with my nuclear family is sort of where I want it to be. I don't speak to my mother anymore; the last time I spoke with her I threatened to kill her (or hurt her or make her life miserable or something to that effect, I can't remember exactly) if she ever hit my brother again. She has not hit my brothers since then. I have two brothers, Noah and Matthew. I don't really speak with Noah either; he's a violent, homophobic, ableist prick and something of an incel, but he's also making the best of his life and I believe is pursuing an M.S. in compsci in Japan. (At least according to our dad). Matthew, I'm starting to have a real relationship with. We haven't actually been in the same room at the same time for a while, but over skype instant message we've sort-of trauma bonded about our shitty family. He used to be a bit conservative, but is turning around. Now that I'm out from under my dad's thumb, he's become cool. A lot of the tension between us that existed when I was a teenager has gone away (though it is nice that I haven't been in the same room as him since the funeral a year and a half ago), and he's calmed down with his anger.
All this to say - I'm not living my best life, but things have been going uphill for quite a while. I think if I keep working hard and pushing myself, I'll manage to make it. I guess with this summary of my present state of affairs out of the way, it's time to talk about my short, medium and long-term futures.
In the short term, I want to focus on my classes and the couple passion projects I have ongoing, and excel in them. I have qualifying exams this upcoming August; I took one of them just a few weeks ago and did well enough to get a Masters', but that's not good enough for me. It'll be tough work, but I reckon I can do it. If I have time, I'll start reading on a potential research subject.
My medium-term goals are longer, more varied and more ambitious. Once I'm done with my qualifying exams, I'll need to choose an academic advisor. There are three that I'm deciding between, and I like them all for different reasons. I'll talk about them in terms of their country of origin, because they all come from different countries. I'm in the habit of being anonymous with you guys, and see no reason to break that.
The first one is Dr. Romania. He's young, handsome, charismatic and a very intense personality, and the work that he does is probably the most abstract and algebraic. He's also one of the most cited professors in his major subfield of operator theory and a well-known name, and his former students work at prestigious universities all around the country. He's constantly busy and difficult to get a hold of, but once you do, he will talk your ear off for hours. His MO is showing up to class 10 minutes late, then letting his lecture go 30 minutes overtime. He has a large, active research group with 5 PhD students currently (though two are probably about to graduate), and he also used to have a postdoc and probably has the funding to hire another.
The second one is Dr. Argentina. He's older, but an incredibly kind, gentle, sweet man. I had a panic attack last semester during his midterm, and he was incredibly empathetic and let me retake it a different day. He's an absolute workaholic who works 96 hours a week and is also somehow able to keep up with every single professional sport ever. He's been invited to speak by foreign governments (most recently I think either Spain or Italy), and his work involves applying functional analysis to measure theory. His research group currently has 3 PhD students (all on the younger end, 2nd and 3rd years) and one postdoc, and he has coauthors across the world.
The third one is Dr. Ukraine. He's also older, and also quite nice. He was my assigned faculty mentor, and though I haven't had a class with him, I have TAed under him and attended some of his talks. He's technically in a lecturer position, not a professor position, so I would need to get a co-advisor (probably Dr. Denmark, his frequent collaborator and coauthor), but he more than manages to maintain a healthy research output that any research professor would envy. Of the three, he's the only one who had a career in Europe - he worked in Kharkiv right up until 2013, and has only been in America for about ten years. His research has fewer barriers to entry, focusing specifically on ergodic theory and topological dynamics; of the seminar talks I attended his I understood the best. All that said, he also has the smallest research group with no current PhD students.
Whoever I choose to be my advisor, I want to continue to learn from the other two anyway. These are all valuable mentoring opportunities that I cannot let go to waste. My ultimate plan for my time at grad school is to become the best analyst in the department. I want to become *the* analysis guy, rather than just another analysis grad student. I want to be for analysis what Nicholas is for category theory. But I also want to have a high research output, and begin regularly attending conferences, hopefully by the end of my third year.
Aside from just academics, I want to explore other parts of my life when I'm done with quals. Whether it's getting back into an old hobby like writing or swimming picking up something new (wargames look fun), I feel like I've been all-math all the time for a while now and I want to become a little bit more well-rounded as a human being.
My longer-term goals are more broadly defined. My dream is to move to somewhere in central or eastern Europe for a postdoc or two once I graduate with my PhD. After that, I hope to get tenure somewhere with a reasonably large research group in whatever I study, and to take PhD students of my own some day. Luckily all three of my potential advisors have 100% placement rates in academia for their students (which is ridiculously impressive!), so I really think that this is attainable. My brother's girlfriend is Bulgarian; if they move there and I move to somewhere in Europe, I think it'll be cool to live nearby(-ish) to him yet again.
And anyway, I guess that's my life so far. I might give an update at some point; I might not. We'll see. I have ambitious goals that'll take over a decade to come to fruition, but I'm finally in a place in life where I'm actively on-track to achieve some of my dreams.
I've posted a few life updates here, but they've all been fairly odd snippets. Five years ago, I was struggling to decide where to go to college. I wound up making the wrong choice, in retrospect. I've documented some of my time in college here, here and here. I ranted about some dark things here, and I think I'm going to pick up from there.
The life-story that I described then is essentially accurate. I left out why I moved in with my dad in 2018, but also, I think I got the timeline wrong. I think I was living with my dad from mid-2016 on, after I ran away from home because my mother was violently, physically and emotionally abusive. I was living with my dad for about a year before I entered into the relationship I mentioned. I used colourful language to dance around the point because it was recent enough that it bothered me, but it's far enough in the past that I can just say that I was raped repeatedly, gaslit and occasionally hit by my first girlfriend. It was not a fun time, and it screwed with my head to the point where my timeline on my life essentially before college is murky.
I don't remember finding out that my maternal grandfather had schizophrenia. It seems possible - he once told me how to escape from a mental institution when I was a kid, and with retrospect I think he was a crank with some interesting ideas on quantum gravity. He passed away in 2016, though, so I can't easily go and ask him, and for some reason I disbelieve it.
I "graduated highschool" in December 2018. In retrospect, I'm not sure whether I actually did. I went on a stage and got a piece of paper that says that I did, yes. But I also went to a small, private special education school. I was the only student in the school graduating highschool; I think at that point I was one of only two students doing highschool-level coursework. With retrospect I'm not convinced that the school was accredited to give highschool diplomas or anything that an American institution would recognize as being equivalent, no matter how good the highschool teacher (singular) was. I did standardized exams to make up for that - first the Singapore O levels, then the British AS levels, and then I lied to college admissions and said that AS levels were the same as A levels. I don't know how I pulled that one off.
I spent the next 6 months living with my paternal grandfather in Myrtle Beach, SC. He was a good guy, and those 6 months were some of the best of my life. Family drama wasn't a thing when it was just the two of us; RPF drama had ended before that. He unfortunately passed away a year and a half ago near the start of my senior year of college after a long battle with dementia and cancer.
I started college in Fall 2019. It's odd that, when I was a kid, I never understood nor used American educational terms, but I am now fully immersed in them. Even little things like "differential calculus" and "integral calculus" as course names as opposed to their actual names, "calculus I" and "calculus II". I made one group of friends, got very drunk and depressed and then scared them off, essentially as I described in my "egos and delusions of grandeur" thread. I wound up making other friends, and various bits of nonsensical drama ensued.
Covid was not fun. I was diagnosed with Bipolar II just before it started, and I was put on zoloft and then when that didn't work for me, seroquel. Seroquel fucked with me badly. I was so heavily sedated that I could barely think when I was awake, and I was sleeping 18 hours a day. In one of my aforementioned threads I mentioned that I'd started medicine that I didn't like; I wound up quitting it, and I've never seen a headshrinker again. Online classes also messed with me and fucked with my grades; just about the only thing I did well during the pandemic was math.
The other big change in my life around college was that I stopped using a phone. Around the time I had my falling out with my friends and my severe depressive episode, I found that I despised phones. I hated the fact that they were constantly tracking you at all times; I hated the crappier phone website designs; I hated the social expectation of being always constantly available. So, in late 2019 I threw my phone in the lake and haven't owned a smartphone since then. Whether it was a flash of insight as to our dystopian hell-world or a severe psychotic break or just me attempting to be weird and quirky and interesting, I'm still unsure.
I suppose it's also noteworthy that I picked up some substances. Drinking was something I'd done since I was young; my journey into drinking is well-documented here. I picked up smoking cigarettes from one of my best friends at the time, and then picked up chainsmoking from my best friend from my summer job. (Or maybe we descended into chainsmoking together). I also started doing adderall a little over a year ago; not legally, but through various dealers. It helps me focus on schoolwork and be highly productive.
There was debate team drama that felt extremely important at the time and which I now barely remember, even a couple years later. There was drama in the house that I lived in for two years that felt extremely important at the time and which I now barely remember, less than a year out. When I was a kid I thought that I was highly sentimental; when I moved in with my dad and left Teddy (my childhood Teddy Bear) behind, I thought that all my youthful sentimentality had gone away. When I was assaulted, I thought that that altered my ability to remember things significantly far back. I think nowadays that none of these are right, and I just have a "locational memory" or "circumstantial memory". Essentially, imagine going to a summer camp and having a great time, then going to school for a year. If you go back to that same summer camp, all those memories will come back and will feel recent and relevant, even if they've been overshadowed by other things for a year. Especially with events that feel highly modular, with a clear start and end and little interaction with my life outside - maybe that's why I struggle to remember the past so much. If I were to visit Singapore and see all those people I used to know again, maybe all my memories would come rushing back to me. Or maybe not.
There are a few things from my time in undergrad that I remember quite well, and that I think I will continue to remember. I was a math major and heavily involved with the department; I grew rather close to my professors. I am rather fond of them, and hope to visit sometime. There was almost no drama; the one bit that there was still weighs heavily on my mind over a year later. I also left with a number of strong friendships still intact, though it's somewhat shocking how quickly I've lost contact with some of them despite my best efforts. As though out of a storybook, I wound up reconnecting with my original first-year friendgroup near the end. Things sort of came full circle; I grew and matured a lot as a person. I went from being arrogant and full of myself to hating and despising myself to being at peace, part of a community that welcomed and accepted me.
Anyway, all that character development has since fallen by the wayside, but I'll elaborate on that later. There are two other important, non-college things that have been ongoing parts of my life since 2021 and 2022. First, I've found another online community to be a part of. This online community is one of talented math students who push themselves to excel in the subject - the youngest are 14-year-old child savants studying algebraic topology, but the majority are either highly dedicated undergraduates or grad students; there's at least two postdocs in that online community. I don't think I'm ever going to leave behind having online communities. The websites may change and the topics of conversation may change and the dynamics may change and the people may change, but I suspect it's something that I'll always do.
I actually met up with some people I met online. From here, I met Lego in real life while I was traveling to my summer job. I've since met five other people from the internet; one became a coworker at my summer job, one goes to the same grad school as me and one is their partner. Real life meetups have an interesting track-record - some of them wind up being awkward, while other times they exceed all expectations. I definitely think that the dynamics are always different in real life than online. That might be why I have such a hard time keeping in touch with people from real life over the internet, too, aside from the times that the online communication exceeds all expectations.
The next important ongoing(-ish) part of my life is my summer job. I worked at a summer camp for gifted young mathematicians in Indiana. (Oddly enough, my bosses name was Tim - this is not my real life name, and I have not gone by it in years. So now what was once my name I associate with someone else far more strongly than myself). Some of my coworkers from there also became close friends. All that said, it's arguable that this is also a blurring of the line between real-life and online-life. One of my coworkers last year was an internet friend first (and I told him about the job and to apply), one of my coworkers from last year has become integrated into part of my online friend group. I'm working on getting another online friend to apply. Plus, it's all math, and math is a very small world.
Before we go to the present, I'm going to take an aside and talk about my sexual orientation and love-life. For quite a long while as a kid and very early twentysomething, I thought that I was asexual and aromantic. My third year of undergrad I realized that I was not aromantic, and had a crush on someone whom I asked out. (I was rejected). A little over a year later, during a week-long absinthe/reading-a-textbook bender over thanksgiving break with a friend from the math department, I learned that I was not asexual. That said, I do quite hate short-term flings for the emotional aftereffects. I suspect nowadays that I'm bidemisexual and bidemiromantic, but had internalized homophobia that made me think I couldn't be attracted to men, and because what I was feeling towards some guy friends (especially Lucas) couldn't possibly be attraction those same feelings towards women also couldn't possibly be attraction.
At my summer-camp last summer (in my second year of working there), I had another week-long fling, this time with a coworker who was theoretically a lesbian. She said that it was just physical and not romantic, because she wasn't romantically interested in men; I accepted that, and moved on. She later got a boyfriend, which makes me feel rather jealous, even though there are plenty of other reasons that a long-distance relationship between grad students just wouldn't work out.
Between my undergrad math department, my online math community, my math-related summer job and the three different math people I wanted to have relationships with but didn't, my self-esteem improved significantly. I cut back a bit on the self-deprecation; I go months without a stray suicidal thought. I feel secure and confident in my place in the world in a way that I really never have before, and I'm optimistic about the future. These are all good things. However, with this, I've noticed that a bit of my old ego is coming back, in a more mature and more subtle form, and I'm not sure how much I like that. I think I was actually a better person when I was a self-loathing mess. I was weirdly more confident when I thought everyone hated me than now when I'm awkwardly trying to get people to like me. And the self-hatred helped keep me humble and mitigated my superiority complex.
In the three weeks after my summer-camp ended, but before I started the next chapter of my life, I was in a sort of liminal in-between stage of life. I saw clearly for the first time in four years how self-contained my college experience was. In some ways, I felt similarly to how I did when I lived in Myrtle Beach with my grandfather, or the winter I spent with my grandmother in New Jersey when I was ten, being in-between things and being able to step away from them and look at them more big-picture. It was an interesting experience, and one I likely won't have again until about 2028. In a sense I think that that's the "real me"; if college me was me playing the part in college and summer-camp-me was me playing the part in summer camp and internet-me was me playing the part online, that was the version of me that went backstage to change my makeup between scenes.
All this brings me, finally, to where I am now. In August, I started my PhD in mathematics at a prestigious midwestern university. It is the beginning of something new, but also in some sense what my life has been building towards since I was five years old and wanted to be an astronaut.
First, the academics. When I lived in Singapore, highschool was intense. It was constant work and studying for a set of exams that felt like they would determine the course of my life. When I moved to the US and started college, the intensity dropped a bit. There was one thing in undergrad that required some amount of intensity, my honours project, but by that point I hadn't been in the habit of hard work for so long that I wasn't able to complete it. Right now, I'm in a state of constant work and studying for a set of exams that feel like they're going to determine the course of my life. (Specifically, these are qualifying exams).
Teaching is a very interesting experience. I'm not teaching anything too serious at school; I run discussion sections for essentially business-major precalculus. It's a thankless job, and far less fun than the teaching that I did at my summer camp. Grading is especially annoying. To make up for how boring I find the content that I'm teaching, I decided to start teaching a free, online course in real analysis, which seems to be going quite well. But it's also a bunch of extra work that I decided to give myself for no reason whatsoever, at a time in my life when I really shouldn't be putting things like that onto myself.
The community here is interesting. Despite being at what's technically a much bigger school than my undergrad, I'm in a smaller environment - I don't really interact socially with people who aren't other math grad students. I have a few friends in my cohort, and a few friends in cohorts above me. That said, at times, I feel like there's a sociable grad-student clique that I'm not a part of, not invited to, not welcome in. I'm finding interacting with people awkward in a way that I didn't really before. With very few exceptions, my acquaintanceships are taking remarkably long to turn into real friendships. The one exception in my cohort is my friend who I often get lunch with - interestingly, this is how I became close friends with my best friend from undergrad. I feel like lunches are a good way to be friends with people, and I'll keep that in the future moving forward.
I feel like my approach to math is very different than when I was an undergrad. As an undergrad, I quickly depleted all the math courses and tried to just take whatever I could. Now that I have access to all the math courses in the world, I am a lot more picky. I quickly learned that algebraic topology is not for me, for example. Conversely, I've fallen in with the analysis group quite quickly; I attend the operator theory seminar regularly, I participated in a reading seminar last semester, and all of this on top of my ordinary coursework. The analysis professors are also all super nice and supportive; I hope that my relationship with this research group will be similar to my relationship with the entire math department where I was an undergrad. There are three professors in particular that I want to work with, and that I'm having a hard time deciding between to pick as my advisor.
I'm living on my own and fully financially independently, finally. Through undergrad I worked (especially over the summer), but I didn't cover every expense myself - I had help from my dad with paying tuition. As a grad student, I don't live a life of luxury, but I get a good enough stipend to afford a shitty apartment with cockroaches and food and utilities and the occasional night out. My shoes are worn to all hell and my laptop is falling apart, but it's better than nothing. And despite the fact that any economist would claim my standard of living has declined significantly, the freedom I now have is more than worth it.
My relationship with my nuclear family is sort of where I want it to be. I don't speak to my mother anymore; the last time I spoke with her I threatened to kill her (or hurt her or make her life miserable or something to that effect, I can't remember exactly) if she ever hit my brother again. She has not hit my brothers since then. I have two brothers, Noah and Matthew. I don't really speak with Noah either; he's a violent, homophobic, ableist prick and something of an incel, but he's also making the best of his life and I believe is pursuing an M.S. in compsci in Japan. (At least according to our dad). Matthew, I'm starting to have a real relationship with. We haven't actually been in the same room at the same time for a while, but over skype instant message we've sort-of trauma bonded about our shitty family. He used to be a bit conservative, but is turning around. Now that I'm out from under my dad's thumb, he's become cool. A lot of the tension between us that existed when I was a teenager has gone away (though it is nice that I haven't been in the same room as him since the funeral a year and a half ago), and he's calmed down with his anger.
All this to say - I'm not living my best life, but things have been going uphill for quite a while. I think if I keep working hard and pushing myself, I'll manage to make it. I guess with this summary of my present state of affairs out of the way, it's time to talk about my short, medium and long-term futures.
In the short term, I want to focus on my classes and the couple passion projects I have ongoing, and excel in them. I have qualifying exams this upcoming August; I took one of them just a few weeks ago and did well enough to get a Masters', but that's not good enough for me. It'll be tough work, but I reckon I can do it. If I have time, I'll start reading on a potential research subject.
My medium-term goals are longer, more varied and more ambitious. Once I'm done with my qualifying exams, I'll need to choose an academic advisor. There are three that I'm deciding between, and I like them all for different reasons. I'll talk about them in terms of their country of origin, because they all come from different countries. I'm in the habit of being anonymous with you guys, and see no reason to break that.
The first one is Dr. Romania. He's young, handsome, charismatic and a very intense personality, and the work that he does is probably the most abstract and algebraic. He's also one of the most cited professors in his major subfield of operator theory and a well-known name, and his former students work at prestigious universities all around the country. He's constantly busy and difficult to get a hold of, but once you do, he will talk your ear off for hours. His MO is showing up to class 10 minutes late, then letting his lecture go 30 minutes overtime. He has a large, active research group with 5 PhD students currently (though two are probably about to graduate), and he also used to have a postdoc and probably has the funding to hire another.
The second one is Dr. Argentina. He's older, but an incredibly kind, gentle, sweet man. I had a panic attack last semester during his midterm, and he was incredibly empathetic and let me retake it a different day. He's an absolute workaholic who works 96 hours a week and is also somehow able to keep up with every single professional sport ever. He's been invited to speak by foreign governments (most recently I think either Spain or Italy), and his work involves applying functional analysis to measure theory. His research group currently has 3 PhD students (all on the younger end, 2nd and 3rd years) and one postdoc, and he has coauthors across the world.
The third one is Dr. Ukraine. He's also older, and also quite nice. He was my assigned faculty mentor, and though I haven't had a class with him, I have TAed under him and attended some of his talks. He's technically in a lecturer position, not a professor position, so I would need to get a co-advisor (probably Dr. Denmark, his frequent collaborator and coauthor), but he more than manages to maintain a healthy research output that any research professor would envy. Of the three, he's the only one who had a career in Europe - he worked in Kharkiv right up until 2013, and has only been in America for about ten years. His research has fewer barriers to entry, focusing specifically on ergodic theory and topological dynamics; of the seminar talks I attended his I understood the best. All that said, he also has the smallest research group with no current PhD students.
Whoever I choose to be my advisor, I want to continue to learn from the other two anyway. These are all valuable mentoring opportunities that I cannot let go to waste. My ultimate plan for my time at grad school is to become the best analyst in the department. I want to become *the* analysis guy, rather than just another analysis grad student. I want to be for analysis what Nicholas is for category theory. But I also want to have a high research output, and begin regularly attending conferences, hopefully by the end of my third year.
Aside from just academics, I want to explore other parts of my life when I'm done with quals. Whether it's getting back into an old hobby like writing or swimming picking up something new (wargames look fun), I feel like I've been all-math all the time for a while now and I want to become a little bit more well-rounded as a human being.
My longer-term goals are more broadly defined. My dream is to move to somewhere in central or eastern Europe for a postdoc or two once I graduate with my PhD. After that, I hope to get tenure somewhere with a reasonably large research group in whatever I study, and to take PhD students of my own some day. Luckily all three of my potential advisors have 100% placement rates in academia for their students (which is ridiculously impressive!), so I really think that this is attainable. My brother's girlfriend is Bulgarian; if they move there and I move to somewhere in Europe, I think it'll be cool to live nearby(-ish) to him yet again.
And anyway, I guess that's my life so far. I might give an update at some point; I might not. We'll see. I have ambitious goals that'll take over a decade to come to fruition, but I'm finally in a place in life where I'm actively on-track to achieve some of my dreams.
