In need of a good sorting

[mmailliw]

• What sort of profession in the wizarding world would you choose and why?
  
  I would choose Bill Weasley’s job as a Curse Breaker at Gringotts, which is the Wizarding version of my dream job in the Muggle world. Being mathematically trained, I know I could meet the Arithmancy requirements (plus it’s a lot more fun to use it to quickly solve problems than to write out long, detailed proofs like an academic). Further, Bill’s job has plenty of opportunities for travel to exotic countries such as Egypt. Although I love traveling (I went to Buenos Aires last year and it was amazing), I haven’t even seen the Muggle version of Egypt; seeing it from a Wizarding perspective would give me insights both on a country I’ve never seen before and the Wizarding world in a country other than England.
  
  
• You have to venture deep into the Forbidden Forest one night. Pick one Harry Potter character other than Hagrid and one object (muggle or magical), besides your wand, that you'd want with you.
  
  Charlie Weasley has spent his whole life working with dragons, so I can’t imagine that there’s a thing in the Forbidden Forest he couldn’t handle. And I would take a powerful Muggle gun with me; together with my wand I would be able to use whichever of Muggle or magical methods works best in any situation.
  
  
• If you had the opportunity to live forever, but your family and friends did not, what would you choose? And if you did choose to live forever, what would you do with eternity?
  
  This almost goes without saying, but I would need to maintain my youth before I would even think of choosing to live forever. One of my worst nightmares involves degenerating slowly into abject decrepitude, powerless to stop my decline.
  If I were able to keep my youth while living forever, I would definitely take it even if it meant outliving my current family and friends. Not only would it let me try every opportunity that appealed to me without thinking ‘this will cost me six years that I’ll never gain back’, but it would be simply amazing to see what progress humanity makes over the next millennium!
  
  
• If you could travel back in time to one point, when and where would you go? Why?
  
  I would go back to the beginning of my freshman year of college so I could better prepare my past self for life as an adult. As a freshman, I didn’t know how the game was played: there were plenty of opportunities to make friends and other contacts and connections that I either didn’t know existed or didn’t know were important! Worse, it took me until I was halfway done before I realized that nearly everyone was seriously overqualified for the classes they were taking and the grading curve and workload was based on the quality of the students, not the syllabus. Therefore, I would choose to inform my past self about the contacts to be made and how course selection is *really* done, thereby making college into the best years of my life!
  
  
• What HP character do you identify with most and why?
  
  Severus Snape is most similar to me. As the teenage 'Half-Blood Prince', he knew that there were better ways to make potions than the methods offered by the textbook. Therefore, he analyzed everything to come up with better ways to make the results instead of just worshipping the Almighty Textbook. By doing so, he was able to improve upon just about every potion! His improvement of the potions textbook is pretty much identical to the way I treat textbooks in my area of study; knowing that there must be a better method than the one offered in print. Further, Snape was able to hide his true goals and desires from just about anyone. This enabled him to gain the confidence of both Dumbledore and his arch-enemy, Lord Voldemort. Similarly, I myself must use Occlumency as a graduate student so that the department will still think that I want the austere life of an academic more than anything else. Doing so allows me to get treated well by the department and earn my Ph.D., while I am simultaneously learning financial economics so that I can branch out from the halls of the Academy.
  
  
• What would you see if you looked into the Mirror of Erised?
  
  Consider that I have been in school for nearly 90% of my life. The last nine of these years have been focusing on mathematics; taking classes, solving problems, and writing research papers. In fact, right now I am mired in a tortuous PhD program in the subject! Therefore, I would likely see myself having just received my PhD after having finally discovered a solution to one of the most famous unsolved problems in the study of analysis on metric spaces. This would have the nice side effect of finally being able to shed the status of being a lifetime student and enter the real world!
  
  Oh, and while I’m at it, can I have my dream body (which looks exactly like my current body, but with five extra inches of height - making me 6’2” - and just a bit of extra muscle mass) too?
  
  
• Do you believe that moral actions should be judged by the intentions behind them, or by the consequences they create?
  
  Both! I can’t imagine viewing any action that was deliberately done with malicious intent positively (we all know Mussolini made the trains run on time, but does that justify fascism?) but if I kill someone, does it matter that I was planning to save the world at the same time? One of the biggest problems I have with Dumbledore, for example, is that he often seems to ignore many consequences of his actions so long as they are ‘for the greater good’.
  
  
• What was your ideal job as a kid? Has that changed? What is your ideal job now?
  
  Well, when I was four I wanted to be an astronaut ;-)… but let’s look at my ambitions when I was sixteen. I had just fallen in love with mathematics (and the life of a Greek philosopher) and wanted to be the closest thing in today’s world; that of a math professor! Ultimately, though, I realized that I wasn’t quite good enough to make a comfortable living as a professor (and also that research math isn’t nearly as interesting as contest math). I don’t know what my ideal job is yet, though there are quite a few tempting options. For example, there are a series of mathematical exams that one needs to take to become an actuary. Although I find actuarial work boring, the examinations remind me a lot of my favorite math contests. If I become an expert in these exams, I could run a business which involves seminars teaching other people how to pass these exams (like bar review, but for actuarial exams). Believe it or not, this pays significantly better than being an actuary. The most successful business of this type, Mad River, nets its proprietor millions of dollars a year - and he only needs to run review sessions for a few months out of the year! I can see my niche because there are no such seminars west of the Mississippi, so I would get to base my seminars in California!
  
  
• If you were able to invent one spell, potion, or charm, what would it do, what would you use it for or how would you use it, and what would you call it?
  
  I would invent a Retrieving Spell (I forgot all of my Latin so I gave it an English name) which would automatically make any item which the caster had lost reappear. As an absent-minded person who has always had a very hard time keeping track of small items (let’s just say that the first spell that I would learn would be a wandless Accio because I would even lose that), I would love to never have to worry about such a thing again!
  
  
• If you were to face a boggart, what would it turn into? And what does it turn into when you throw the counter-spell, Riddikulus?
  
  My biggest fear is of losing both my mental and physical capacities at a relatively young age. In fact, when I was in undergraduate, my workload had been so intense that I had to completely let myself go physically, reaching a peak weight of 179 pounds! Although I have since regained my form, largely thanks to my year in England, I still fear returning back to those college days, when I felt like a ball of blubber and struggled to maintain an A-/B+ average.
  
  Therefore, my boggart will likely take the form of a worn-down future version of myself in his mid-to-late twenties. This future Willy will have so much work to do that he cannot sleep or exercise, so he will look worse than I did in my college days. Worst of all, however, he will be unable to succeed in any of his tasks; his 16-hour days will be barely enough to avoid the chopping block each week!
  When I say “Riddikulus”, this worn-down version of myself will melt into a pile of goo (in the most comical way imaginable) allowing me to laugh at the goo and thereby destroy the boggart.
  
  
• What do you look for in a friend?
  
  On multiple-choice 'sorting hat' quizzes, this question is really hard, but here I can actually say what I want. Of course I want my friends to be loyal to me; who would want a friend to stab them in the back? I also want my friends to challenge me intellectually; interesting conversation with friends definitely makes my day better. However, I also want friends who can help me out (be it through sound advice or through connections). As much as I may wish otherwise, this world is too complicated for one to just go at it alone!
  
  
• What trait most annoys you about other people?
  
  The attitude that the only thing that matters for someone in a career is that they get to do something they love. In my field, many people do not care about their actual prospects of success (or about whether they can earn a decent living, for that matter) as long as they're doing mathematics in any form at a university.
  
  To me, this is about as ridiculous as someone who really loves cooking but isn't any good at it working at an entry-level job at McDonald's for their whole life just because they get paid to do something they love!
  
  Worse, when more people in my field who are willing to accept crappy conditions and low prospects for advancement, employers have to offer less to people entering the field (when overqualified people are wiling to accept low-tier adjunct positions, why do universities need to create *real* positions?) There's a reason why the career trajectory for a typical academic in economics is so much better than that in mathematics... it's because the academics in economics have figured this out!
  
  
• What do you think are your top five abilities or qualities?
  
  -I am very determined. Whenever I set a goal for myself, I plan out a path to achieve it; never relenting until I do so. My arrangement to spend a year studying in England (which I did by finishing undergrad a year early) is a prime example of this.
  
  -I like to think of myself as intelligent. What this means to me is that I am capable of using my brain to truly think and analyze. I hope that this community views my analyses from this application as an example of this trait!
  
  -I have a really good memory. In other words, I can recall all sorts of experiences from the distant past as if they happened yesterday.
  
  -I have a realistic view on life. This, when coupled with my ironic sense of humor, allows me to see things as they really are and express them in ways that people will appreciate. An example of this, http://mmailliw.livejournal.com/46387.html, makes fun of the well-known “8th grade proficiency exam” to show that people today aren’t necessarily stupider than those from the 19th century.
  
  -Finally, I am trustworthy. If I make a promise to you, I will do everything in my power to make sure that I keep it! Of course, this means that I make fewer promises than one would expect because the flip side of this is I don’t promise anything unless I know that I can deliver.
  
  
• What do you think are your top five weaknesses or worst qualities?
  
  - I am very absent-minded. Often, when I think about some theoretical idea or exciting plan to succeed, I lose track track of small objects. As everyone who’s familiar with key replacement fees knows,this can be a very costly flaw.
  
  -I am a perfectionist and therefore will often fail to be satisfied with what should ordinarily be considered a good job. This often slows me down because it is often inefficient to make sure that I have a complete, perfect understanding of anything before moving on.
  
  -The flip side of realism is being pessimistic. When confronted with two possibilities, I often tend to view the more depressing possibility as being more realistic. While planning for the worst is often a good idea, pessimism is a negative trait because it makes people sadder than they should be.
  
  -Although I am loyal to my friends and family, I must admit to being selfish. In other words, I care more about my own happiness in life than about whether or not I help others in the process.
  
  -Finally, I worry too much. A little bit of worrying is good to keep me on my toes, yet too much worrying can deplete one’s energy. Even worse, worrying can prevent one from taking potentially beneficial actions due to fear of consequences, impeding the process by which we can act on our ambitions!
  
  
• Define in your own words the following key traits:
  
  • Courage: Willingness to confront one’s fears so that they don’t impede one’s actions.
    
  • Loyalty: Devotion to those who have earned one’s trust, respect, or support.
    
  • Intelligence: A combination of raw knowledge and the ability to use it to solve new problems.
    
  • Ambition: Having goals and being willing and determined to do what it takes to achieve them. This should NOT be confused with ‘evil’!
    
  
  
• Name: William
  
• Age: 24 until May 12
  
• Where did you find out about us? I’ve heard plenty of hogwarts_elite members talk about it; when my friend pierhias applied, I looked at her application and learned that many of my favorite H_E members are in this community as well!
  
• Do you plan on being active in the communities once you are sorted?
  Obviously; why else would I apply? ;-)
  
  Note: I edited my responses for the question about which trait annoys me and for my age (though the birthday wishes are nice anyway).