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!