I’ve been “blogging” on and off for more than a decade now. I struggle to decide what to put out there: I have so many thoughts, and I rarely have a time or place to share them. Every place sort of has its own issues: I love text-based social media, but the best we have is forums like reddit, which are not a great place to post “opinions” or thoughts, because they’re intended to be discussion forums, or Twitter-style (are we seriously calling it “X” now?) platforms that incentivize very short posts, which in turn incentivizes writing the pithiest version of your statement possible with no nuance whatsoever, which incentivizes reactionary statements and makes productive conversations very difficult.

Here are some things I’ve learned so far this summer:

1. Reading is slow.
2. Understanding things is slow and there are no shortcuts.
3. If you keep revisiting the same concepts they might make sense eventually, things aren’t impossible.
4. Academics are opinionated people who find it hard to agree on things, so faculty meetings are messy.
5. Most people are bad at writing.
6. Blackboards are a pain to work with.
7. Don’t self-select out of asking for things, initiative is good.
8. Talking to people can be hard.
9. File management is useful.
10. You can always break down problems further.
11. Someone projecting confidence may or may not actually know what they’re talking about.

Writing poems feels like abstracting the train of thought itself, and it feels a little weird, like I’m leaving gaps for the reader to fill in within the context of whatever “structure” or “internal logic” I’m trying to create.

I feel like the difference between trying to write prose and writing poems is that writing prose feels like creating chains of causality between things, whereas writing poems sometimes feels like constructing a world where two (or more) things are related, and then placing both things in that world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “academic lineage” recently and I don’t have anything concrete to say yet but it is very interesting.

If you are like me, you did not particularly enjoy math in high school, so the idea of learning an entirely new type of math in university might be terrifying to you. I know this can be scary and overwhelming (it was for me!), so here are some things I learned when taking my first proof-based mathematics course. Hopefully you find this helpful.