A li'l vignette from back in my Gradual Student days

[rampling]

Here's a li'l story from back when I was a tenured (10-yeared) grad student, illustrating the importance of a particular Good Student Survival Skill. [Excerpted from a comment I made else-LJ]Many years ago, in grad school, I took a grad-level math class for my minor -- the first grad-level math class I'd ever taken. It was "Applied Algebra"[*],

Comments

[wcg]

My experience with math majors is that, as a group, they tend to be oblivious to emotional clues. They get to grad school by being very good at solving problems and understanding that the answer to most higher math problems is either 1, 0, pi, or e.

[rampling]

Perhaps they did miss the prof's emotional broadcasting. I seem to remember that he also emphasized the stuff in more ordinary mathy ways, but perhaps I only saw that because I read his enthusiasm. It hadn't occurred to me that I may have been picking up cues that the others didn't have such access to. Intriguing.

[hitchhiker]

I got screwed by that in my advanced Q Mech course - the guy spent the last few lectures on quantum field theory, so I passed lightly over it, figuring it'd be more productive to get the earlier stuff down pat. He was evidently enthused over it, though, since it counted for 40% of the final exam(!)

[rampling]

Ohhhh, I hate it when that happens! *sympathy*

[hitchhiker]

the scary thing is that all that gibberish might've been the more prosaic maths that something even more abstract was applied *to* :)

[rampling]

Prolly so! If the 'applied' stuff existed in that course at all, it could have easily been hidden in that particular gibberish.

[otherbill]

When I was in grad school, I couldn't really tell the difference between excited babbling and run-of-the-mill blathering, so that Good Student Survival Skill would've been totally lost on me.

(However, I was at least able to pick up on what things were more important than others, as my notes occasionally have big asterixes (asterii?) in the margins, with arrows pointing to the important stuff...)

[rampling]

In my reply to wcg's comment, I wrote: Perhaps they did miss the prof's emotional broadcasting. I seem to remember that he also emphasized the stuff in more ordinary mathy ways, but perhaps I only saw that because I read his emotional enthusiasm. It hadn't occurred to me that I may have been picking up cues that the others didn't have such access to. Intriguing.
Your comment would seem to support his comment. I do suspect you would've picked up on the mathy emphasis he gave that topic. Though the reported failure of all the other students to pick up on his cues may mean that the emotional cues were much louder and the mathy cues too subtle (in an already extremely confusing course).

[otherbill]

Actually, in retrospect, I did have the sense to take extra-good notes when the professors began talking about their own theses and dissertations. There's an emotional emphasis there, even if they don't broadcast it. ;-)