The renewed faculty/graduate student dinner series is off to a most excellent start. Diners were Cassie Graham, Edwin Oshea, Annie Garrison, Rosalie Tepper, Kris Kissel and Matias Courdurier, students, and Don Marshall, Tom Duchamp, Rehka Thomas, Paul Smith and Ginger Warfield, faculty. Our first accomplishment was to prove that 11 really isn't that much greater than 10, which is the theoretical upper bound for the number in one of the Marlai tatami rooms. We did just fine (though I'm not altogether sure what happened to Cassie's knees.)
After the usual settling-in process we began a round of introductions. Splendid variety within each category. Among the graduate students we had, for a start, Matias and Edwin from Chile and Ireland respectively. Kris did a Masters at Pitt, Cassie and Rosalie taught high school and Annie played basketball in Luxemburg. Among the faculty members I think the only point in common was that Don and Tom both had the timing of their graduate careers influenced by the draft (one of several bits of ancient history with which the students were regaled in the course of the evening!)
I then lobbed a few questions or comments into the midst in the hope that one of them would bounce its way into provoking a conversation. To the rather tame initial query of what around the department could do with some attention came a swift reply of "money." Turned out to have a very interesting layer to it -- the university is assessing fees far in excess of anything Tom, as Graduate Advisor, was aware of. We were all duly horrified, not to mention highly sympathetic. Unfortunately, that was all, because that is one aspect of graduate life that is totally beyond departmental control. Next up was computers, of which the department now supplies one or two per graduate student office. They're kind of ancient, as computers go, because there is no budget to supply them directly, so all of them get to graduate offices via some faculty office. Kris remarked that his, with the instinct well known to anyone using computers, tends to crash just as he is hurrying to print something out in time to deal with the inevitable paper jams in the photocopier. This led to a spot of reminiscing on the part of the faculty members about things like typewriters, and producing documents with cutting and pasting back when the cutting was something done with scissors and the pasting involved genuine scotch tape. Tom capped all our stories with his description of his thesis, which involved superscripts with their own superscript and subscripts with their own subscript, all done on a regular typewriter. Don followed up with some tales of the early days when acquiring computers for the department was done by going to Microsoft and collecting ones they had officially thrown away. After which the graduate students were encouraged to take up their computer issues with the MSCC, who will, in fact, benefit from hearing of said difficulties, because they supply ammunition when it comes to making requests.As long as technology was around, telephones were an obvious follow-up. As a conversation generator they kind of struck out, though, because it turned out that when he was chairman Don had found the funding to offer phones for all graduate student offices, and the graduate students had voted against having them. Oh.
A brief pause ensued, and then Edwin came up with a comment/suggestion that we could all get our teeth into, and the conversation took off like a rocket. It was beautifully articulated, and far better elaborated than I can reproduce, so I shall have to do it the injustice of a synopsis: in the current system, the need to pass prelims dominates the students' minds almost exclusively for the first two years. There's a lot of good and interesting mathematics to be learned, and it is good to have a solid and broad background in a number of fields, but learning it all with a weather eye out to passing an exam has a very specific feel to it. That feel is very different from what he is now experiencing as he does his learning in order to get into the research field he is working on with Rekha. If he had had a chance to feel that way about his learning earlier on, he would have been both happier and better motivated. So how about arranging for that to happen?
A definite conversation-enlivener, that. The first thing it produced was a hefty list of the difficulties. There are fields, for instance, where the first step towards research is to read a 500 page tome. Not something that can be tucked lightly into the midst of prelim prep. That's an extreme point, but not an exceptional case -- many topics would require appreciable amounts of reading before anything could be done with them. Paul pointed out that that is a general Life Lesson in mathematics anyway -- seniority does not imply exemption from the need to take in (or possibly take back in) large hunks of undigested mathematical material. On the other hand, there do exist areas where open questions lie near the surface. Or does it need to be open questions? Could one get a sense of research exploring questions which have, in fact, been answered? What is needed in order to sense that excitement? What system could be set up that would offer such an experience to all students?
We didn't find answers to those questions, possibly because there aren't any, but we explored a lot of interesting notions along the way. And some combination of them led up to the next proposition, again from Edwin: is there some way to diminish the challenge of the enormous leap of faith that a student must make in deciding both whether a field is one in which he or she is willing to spend the next several years and whether a faculty member is one with whom he or she is willing to spend it. How can you tell what a field is like, especially at the research end? In particular, how can you tell what kind of research a particular professor does? The Current Problems seminar is designed to help with that, but at one a week, with a faculty of sixty, it takes too long to get around. How about if folks were asked to write an abstract as if they were going to give a talk in that seminar? Well, not quite that, because the abstracts tend to be either teasers or too technical. Well, then, how about if a student took notes during the seminar itself, wrote up a condensed version and presented it to the faculty member for editing, with the understanding that if unedited, it will be published as it stand? How about if, in particular, a student working with that faculty member were put in charge of doing it, which would be a good exercise, and also more likely to result in a coherent product?
We're back to the issue of speed, since this is back on the timetable of the Current Problems seminar, but if we got it started with this, other ways might be found to augment it. It would have definite merits from the point of view of giving people from elsewhere (prospective students, for instance) a picture of what goes on around here and, in due course, it would provide the kind of clarification that Edwin was talking about and others were agreeing to the need of.
In short, I think we can reasonably be said to have produced an Idea. And what particularly tickles me about this one is that it builds directly on the result of an earlier Dinner Idea, to wit, the Current Problems seminar itself. Tune in in another decade or so and we shall see what can be built on top of this one!