catching up to do
So it's actually been nine whole months since my last entry. This is even more impressive than the five month hiatus before that. Where do I even begin?
Well, actually, a pretty damn good place to start is that I'm going back to school. In the middle of January, after a good friend got me to realize just how assertive I wasn't being, I took the bold step of enrolling in undergraduate math courses a day before the spring semester began. So by mid-January, my "year off" was over much sooner than I thought it would be.
I'm switching from chemistry to math for grad school, but my background at Yale was quite lacking. I left with only 12 (acceptable) undergraduate math credits, and 30 are needed to apply to grad school. Back in January, I sought out the graduate director of mathematics at Montclair (the closest institution with a respectable graduate math program) and got an outline of courses that would be necessary to take before enrollment. Six math courses later, I would be able to apply for grad school. The only issue would be where to find them and how to take them as quickly as possible.
After some schedule-checking and realizing that certain things (e.g. 3 classes in the spring or 4 classes in the fall) would be impossible and/or suicidal, the end result was two courses at Union County College in the spring [linear algebra and differential equations], a course at Rutgers in the summer [number theory] and, most likely, three courses at Montclair in the fall. [As of now, those courses look to be probability, foundations of modern algebra, and advanced calculus 1.]
Having UCC as my first post-Yale educational experience helped a bit to ease me back into things. Having friends from high school in my diffeq class helped even more. Not only was I able to return to a role of pseudo-professor -- re-teaching my friends the lesson after the lesson had been taught -- but I rediscovered that I really, truly do love math. As tiring as it was to go to night school four nights a week, it was enjoyable to learn all of the material (some old, most new). Even though neither class had collected or graded homework due, I found myself doing all of the recommended problems with no provocation, simply because it was exciting to be learning again.
While I slipped back into old college ways for number theory at Rutgers (not having the book for the first half of the course thanks to an unreliable Amazon seller may have contributed) and didn't do much reading outside of the course, the class felt great in an entirely different way. Unlike the two county courses (admittedly, UCC was pretty simple), this course gave me a true challenge. It wasn't just that the professor condensed the full 14-week course into 6 weeks of summer; the material was actually challenging. It felt like I was working through a vast puzzle which, by the end of the course, looked very simple when fully assembled. My professor also liked me very much, and is likely going to help me with decisions for graduate school in the coming months.
So now, after 6 months without much of a break from classes, I finally have what can fleetingly be called a "summer vacation".
I actually mainly started writing this with full intentions of going into things that aren't going nearly as well as the classwork -- things like problems at home, loneliness, health, work, problems at home -- but I feel like it's a bit of a cop-out to only resort to LJ when I have something to gripe about. (Also, it's now 12:30, and I would like to sleep soon.) I've only now just reintroduced myself to you all, so at least for one night, I'll leave it at this. Not that a fair number of you didn't already know this anyway, but the best writers don't go making you assume prior knowledge before launching further into the story.