Diners were Kiana Ross, Julie Eaton, Ariana Dundon, Mike Cecil and Sasha
Aravkin, graduate students and Steffen Rohde, Chris Burdzy, Selim Tuncel, Tom
Duchamp and Ginger Warfield, faculty members.
Sometimes an experiment really pays off. After many successful dinners with a
consistent format of spreading the level of graduate students from nearly done
to nearly new, we decided this time to try zeroing in on one group. All five
were first year students. I'm not sure that accounts for the fact that this was
the liveliest evening in a long time-- I think that was just who everyone was --
but it certainly accounts for the way the brainstorming portion of the evening
came up with a really terrific cluster of highly action-worthy ideas.
Conversation, in fact, was so lively that we didn't even get to introductions
for a while. When we did, one of the striking things was the variety of
backgrounds of the faculty members present. Not too surprising, considering that
the other four had youths in Poland, Turkey, Germany and even Louisiana. Made my
own Virginia look downright bland. Similar variety in the mathematical aspects
of our early days -- Chris had a mother who was a Probabilist, and it never
occurred to him to want to be anything else (nor does he wish it had!). Steffen
found it easy and (when he finally got challenged for a bit) interesting, and
furthermore thought it would be a good way to outshine his older brother. I've
muddled the other stories, but they were all good and, as I said, nicely
contrasting.
The graduate students had less of the exotic in their backgrounds, and one piece
of uniformity that warmed the cockles of all five faculty hearts: they told us
their various routes to graduate school, and then each one indicated very
convincingly that he or she was delighted to have chosen UW. I think I'm glad we
didn't ask them that late in autumn quarter, but as of now all are feeling well
settled in and well supported by their peers and well treated by the faculty.
After that the conversation wandered for a while through a wide range of topics,
from Harvard's president's opinion that women may just not be cut out to be
mathematicians ("He never met my mother", said Chris) to the types of offices
available in Padelford. In fact, things periodically got so enthusiastic that
there were up to five simultaneous conversation, all of them, as far as I could
tell, very interesting. Not bad for just ten people, but not too good for
reporting on.
Eventually we collected our conversations into one again, and this time Selim
posed a question for the students: "Looking back over the year, can you think of
anything that didn't happen and that you wish had, and/or anything that did
happen and you wish hadn't?" It was a place where we were happy that nothing
leapt into their minds, and even happier with the ideas that came up when they
had had a bit of cogitation time. The first set of ideas centered around the
high-stress, overwhelmed moments of beginning autumn quarter. Wouldn't it be
nice if all the first years could go on a hike together sometime in the course
of TA training? Double purpose -- bonding and relaxing. That got such an
enthusiastic reception that we batted it around and expanded it potentially in a
bunch of directions. Maybe a boat trip together (one of those harbor cruise
deals). Or going to a play. Or renting a bunch of canoes and exploring the
Arboretum. All are rendered particularly plausible by the new system of starting
fall quarter on a Wednesday, so that the TA training necessarily involves
a week-end.
We rested on our laurels for a bit after working on that idea. Also worked on a
splendid array of desserts (it's sticky rice and mango season again!) Then we
checked back in on the original questions and Kiana launched a whole new series
of ideas by commenting that she wished she could have gotten as comfortable with
the professors teaching her courses as she did with the ones for whom she was
TAing. Not, she clarified, that they were intimidating by nature -- she now
feels fine going to their office hours and asking for help -- but that for the
first quarter she definitely did feel intimidated. That got the brains to
storming again, and in the end we came up with a lunch proposal. A proposal for
a bunch of lunches, that is. The idea is to have the professor teaching each of
the first year core courses take subsets of the class out to lunch, eventually
seeing to it that all students have been invited. "But who's going to pay for
the lunches?" "No problem", said Selim, "I'll just ask!" Nice evidence of the
way some of the progress we have been making over the past few years has been
supported by the generosity of our donors.
With two major ideas to our credit, we decided to call it an evening, except
that we were all enjoying each other's company so much that we kept not leaving.
It really was an excellent evening!