Courses

I took four courses this semester.

• MATH 389: Advanced Analysis. This was a topics course on C*-algebras, and it was the coolest class I've taken at Williams. I enjoyed the material enough that studying never really felt like a chore, even when I spent an absurd amount of time preparing for the final. Looking back, I wish I had spent more time reading Bratteli and Robinson instead of relying mostly on the lecture notes. I also wish we had gotten a bit further into Tomita-Takesaki theory near the end of the semester. The class had six problem sets, an in-person midterm, an oral final, and a written final. Somehow I finished with a grade above 98%, which is probably the hardest I've ever grinded a class here. It helped that the cutoff for an A was only 85%, so there was never much stress about grades. More than anything, this was the first class I've taken here where none of the work felt annoying or like busywork.
• MATH 413: Algebraic Geometry. This was the math course I spent the least time on, averaging about 10 hours per month outside of class, with an additional ~10 hours during months with exams. Despite a seemingly heavy workload (including weekly problem sets, weekly quizzes, weekly forum posts, two written midterms, an oral midterm, an oral final, and a final project) the course felt surprisingly manageable. Much of the material overlapped with concepts I was already comfortable with, and the new content focused primarily on algorithms to do computations in algebraic geometry, which I did not find particularly engaging. Even with frequent mistakes on the more algorithmic problems, I finished with a 97%. The highlight of the course was the final project, for which I wrote a short expository paper titled Projective Toric Surfaces via Convex Lattice Polygons.
• MATH 419: Tiling Theory. This was my easiest math class in terms of content difficulty, but I struggled a lot in this class. I never found the material all that interesting, and by the end of the semester I was starting to get tired of it. A lot of the course felt repetitive, especially once the main ideas had been established. Despite finding the material fairly straightforward, I somehow managed to do badly on both exams. Fortunately there was a pretty generous curve, which ended up saving me.
• THEA 103: Acting Fundamentals. This class was an experience. We met once a week for three hours, but there never seemed to be any structure or long-term plan. It always felt like the professor was improvising activities to fill the class period. One day I arrived late and everyone was sitting silently. When someone finally asked what we were doing, the professor said that we were meditating. I probably should not say much more since I got an A and have no complaints about that. Altogether, I spent maybe five hours outside of class on coursework for the entire semester.

I also TA'd for Tiling Theory while taking the class. Most of my responsibilities involved grading homework, which was more time consuming than I expected since many of the problems required checking detailed drawings. Spending so much time grading definitely made me less enthusiastic about doing the assignments myself. The work was fine overall, but it was not especially exciting.

Other

Most of my academic energy this semester went into Advanced Analysis, so I did not spend as much time learning math on my own as I usually do. Outside of classes, I also spent a huge amount of time working on applications (for the summer and for next school year). The results were better than I could have hoped for, and I am very happy with how everything turned out, but I strongly dislike writing application materials. If given the choice, I would happily trade all of that time back for more math.

• Research. I spent a lot of time working on my research project with Professor Yang.
• Galois Theory. I sat in on a few of the final meetings of the Galois theory course even though I was not enrolled. They covered some pretty interesting topics, including homological algebra. At the same time, I was glad not to be taking the class myself. From what I heard, some people a large amount of all nighters studying for the final.
• Walks. I went on a lot of walks, usually around the Clark. It is a really nice place to be after sunset.

Looking forward: Over the summer, I’ll be doing research in the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland. Next school year, I will be at the University of Oxford.