Diners were
Selim Tuncel, Tom Duchamp, Chuck Doran, Steve Mitchell, Ginger Warfield, Matt
Ballard, Zsuzsanna Dancso, Kris Reed, Eric Bahuaud, and Travis Kopp.
The first notable achievement of the evening was an absence: for upwards of two
hours on the eve of the Great Election neither the name of Kerry nor of Bush was
spoken, and even the word "vote" came up only in a sort of post script as we got
assembled to depart. Main credit for that, I'd say, goes to the fact that there
were so many interesting people with interesting things to say that there was no
room for the extraneous.
That this would be a discussion full of interesting perspectives was clear by
the end of the initial round of self-introductions. The basic mandate is to
answer three questions: who are you? How did you come to be a mathematician? How
did you come to turn up here at UW? The range this time was spectacular. Tales
of a Hungarian undergraduate program were slightly hair-raising (talk about a
pressure-cooker ambience!), while a straight-faced account of choosing Seattle
for graduate work on the basis that it is easier to find accommodations for two
cats and a dog provided a lovely counter-balance. As frequently occurs, several
people had been enticed into mathematics after intending to go into
physics. Chuck Doran broke the mold on that, though, by declaring that he never
left physics -- just lives in both (and very happily, at that!)
By the time we had gotten through that particularly lively set of opening
remarks the dinner had arrived, so we settled into a bit more structured
discussion, centered around prelims. Not "What should we do about them?" or
"What is wrong with them?", but a more general "What do you think about them?"
As it turned out, people thought a lot of different things, some of them
specifically about our own version, and more of them about the institution of
prelims itself. The toughest stance came from a graduate student , gleefully
overstating his case with "Just sock it to them. It's a good idea to find out
early if you just don't have what it takes, and might as well give up." The most
wistful came from a faculty member, noting that at Dartmouth the prelims are
oral and are regarded as an opportunity to find out what the student does know,
not what he/she doesn't. Philosophically we all liked that, but it didn't
produce a flood of votes for orals (in fact, he wasn't so advocating.) There are
some options open for Dartmouth in its smallness that just aren't there for us.
Basically, nobody seemed to be feeling that the prelims were producing terrible
pressure, or even that tweaking was particularly called for. A new option
involving replacing one by a highly structured reading course option has just
come into effect this month and looks intriguing.
Someone brought up the question of people who are in the PhD program and wind up
wanting a teaching career -- specifically a career at a four-year college.
Again, Dartmouth has some geographical advantages over us, but we do indeed have
students who take that option, and we do manage to place them, even though the
liberal arts college density is notably low in this vicinity. At least it's not
zero!
With that we folded down the conversation, with due passing honors to Limbo,
which used to be an absolutely dependable piece of the PFF dinners. Limbo in
this case being the state of bewildered disorientation that in days gone by
seemed the inevitable sequel to passing the prelims. That recurrent theme has
been one of the motivators for a number of recent changes in the prelim
structure, and the fact that it has quietly disappeared from the conversation
appears to indicate that the adjustments are achieving that part of the
goal. Hurrah!