Dinner # 14 April 19, 2004

Diners were Anton Dochtermann, Matt Kahle, Beth Morris, Chris Quarles and Anusha Sekar, graduate students, and Tom Duchamp, Jack Lee, Isabella Novik, Selim Tuncel and Ginger Warfield, faculty members.

It was clear from the start that this was going to be a lively evening. Before we even opened the menus we were knee-deep in an intense discussion of a major topic: what should be done with the excess money in the coffee fund? There was an enthusiastic minority favoring the purchase of an espresso machine, but we didn't win the day. Neither did the folks who suggested that it ought to be spent on fuses to replace the ones that the current machine keeps blowing (their failure may have had to do with the fact that it's on a circuit breaker.) No conclusion reached, but the ice was well and truly broken.

After due consideration of the menu, we proceeded to introductions, with the question "When did you decide to become a Math major?" attached. Got a nice variety. Possibly the most striking was the double major in art and math who would have enjoyed pursuing either but was swayed by practical considerations. Jack Lee, on the other hand, didn't even minor in Math -- he rejected it firmly in favor of Anthropology. A post-graduation job teaching math at a private high school persuaded him that math was worth pursuing and teaching was worth pursuing and high school was worth avoiding. Goes to demonstrate that there are lots of routes to becoming a mathematics professor!

It took a while to get all the way around the table because so many of the stories provoked interesting discussion or questions, but we eventually did so. Whereupon Chris (nickname: Graduate Student Representative) Quarles slightly astounded some of us by saying "I know we are here because you want to ask us things, but first I want to ask you something." Our consternation was caused not by the question but by his impression of the cause of his invitation. The dinners were actually motivated, back in the palmy days of the PFF grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, by the realization that we were sending graduate students out to SU and SCCC to learn about faculty life on those two campuses, but they knew nothing about faculty life on ours. This we duly explained, and then proceeded to tackle Chris's question. I can't reproduce the question because it provoked such an interesting and multi-faceted conversation that the original bits escape me. Basically what he did was to launch a discussion of the Prelims that led to a pretty long-term history of them, and an explanation of the most recent four or five changes and the background for another proposed change that's still at the vulnerable pre-faculty-vote stage. One thing that emerged from this confirmed a slightly fuzzy impression of mine: the academic level of the graduate students has been spiraling gently upward. This has interesting consequences on a number of fronts, including prospects for yet more changes in the prelims, assuming the trend continues. The student diners looked slightly stunned when they were told that a couple of decades ago it was quite normal still to be working on Prelims at the end of one's third year.

Once we had turned the Prelims upside-down and inside-out and shaken and pummeled them so as to encourage every little bit of information to fall out we turned briefly to other topics. The major one was that of a former topic, to wit, Limbo. To the students' query whether Prelims haven't dominated conversation from the word "Go" we replied that for several years they took a distinctly back seat to Limbo. Turns out Limbo -- the state of complete, rudderless bewilderment that used to seem inevitable for the first months after the completion of the Prelim ordeal -- rang no bells with any of them. Something is definitely going right!



[Back to index]