Cell and molecular bio in undergrad. Dicked around in grad school for neuroscience. In med school now.

yuss! purity, abstinence. -catz-

i responded to your Qs

Yes, that is a good plan. But remember that a facade will only last so long. At least in my case this has been true.

Mainly array indexing (starts at 1 instead of 0, and uses parantheses instead of brackets). Plus it has most of the drawbacks of a scripting language with few of the benefits. It's a language for people who can't program.

Alcoholism and how to use Excel.

They're just not interested in what you're talking about (they don't know what integration is, and even if they did, they'd probably define it and the conversation would end). Also you challenge and then insult them ("Do you remember anything?").

Yes, it was interesting to find out just how much wealth was in the Detroit area when I started doing demographical research. I never knew about it growing up there because I only left the city a few times.

When I'm done with my PhD, I probably won't stick around in Michigan because it's not the best state for LGBT folks like myself.

Do you think that is possible? Doesn't writing code require ingenuity?

Applied math huh? That's what I'm planning on doing too. I want to do the master's in nuclear engineering and then do a PhD in Applied Math where I would work on a nuclear engineering problem. So you learned how to code during your Econ degree? That's pretty rare, congrats. I struggled last semester with Java but I eventually got the hang of it.

hmmm...since you have taken econometrics you must be close to graduation or have already graduated. What are you post college interests?

Euler was a very intelligent mathematician, and possibly the greatest to ever live. perhaps he did know the majority of the mathematics that existed in his time, but my point was that mathematics is such a huge field, including everything that we know and everything that we don't, that it would be impossible for one person to know it all. Just like learning history is more like learning a summary of history rather than learning every single second of every single persons life for a period of time.

I still like economics, and I enjoyed the more "rigorous" classes like microeconomics and mathematical economics, in addition to learning the different schools of thought, but econometrics is what completely turned me off to the field as I realized that the majority of research in economics is really in econometrics, which consists of mostly statistical manipulations and arbitrary interpretations. So I decided to go into a harder science with less politics. (typed on phone)

Good point. This is the power of ABSTRACTION.

Really? I've met quite a lot.

I would... when taken in combination with the fact that she could not even comprehend its purpose.

I have a graduate level degree in an engineering discipline. My point is the example she showed would be generally considered undergrad level work. Very basic.

Or where does she go to school? This is Graduate school work?

Hah, cool. :D

It's funny because I've briefly considered going back and getting degrees in psychology and finance, or english and business, or something like that. But, though I know I would enjoy it, it'd be a waste of time and money from a practical perspective. I can learn those sorts of things on my own if I want to, and having three degrees already makes me look kind of freakish on paper anyway.

I wouldn't worry about your situation. I knew a fair number of people in college who were in their 6th year of undergrad and had not yet even gotten one degree due to switching majors multiple times.

In lower-level courses, you learn the mechanical methods because these illustrate the fundamentals, as well as handle many of the frequently encountered applications.

In more advanced courses, you are exposed to refinements and special cases needed to handle variations from the commonly encountered situations. And, of course, the level of abstraction is increased, and you begin to see connections between areas that you never suspected. When you begin doing research, you embark on a journey beyond the frontier that has been settled by others; you will probably have a few fellows traveling not too far away, and might form working alliances with some of them. On this journey, though, it will be mostly up to you to craft any new tools you need to make progress.

It is just about time for you to stop thinking of mathematics as a set of deeply cut channels with well defined boundaries like "differential equations" and "Linear Algebra". In the rarefied air of higher mathematics, these distinctions become so blurry that in many ways, they no longer exist. It is by drawing together the common threads from all that you have seen that you will progress. Stop looking for differences, and begin to look for similarities.