PFF Graduate student/Faculty dinner, Thursday, February 17, 2000.

Diners: Jed Mihalisin, Assad Ebrahim, Jim Mailhot, Gordon Williams, Leah Berman; Don Marshall, Selim Tuncel, Jack Lee, Anne Greenbaum, Ginger Warfield

The resumption of PFF dinners brought with it for me a bunch of familiar sensations, all but one of them pleasant. The pleasant ones included the food, the fellowship and the sensation of watching people gain genuine insights into each other’s perspectives and constraints. The less pleasant is the feeling that there is no way I can do justice to the conversation, especially this one, which I felt to be particularly rich and lively. But I do know that one of the most exciting ideas turned up at the very end, and that it resulted from various previous bits, and with that as a carrot dangling before me I shall forge ahead.

The self-introduction phase already brought with it appreciable revelations on the faculty side, since it brought up the issue of rotating administrative jobs, both the graduate advisorship, which Jack is ten months, one week and five days from finishing and Selim from beginning, and the chairmanship, for which Don did not give us the count-down, but did produce some choice harrowing details. Talk about an introduction to the service aspect of faculty life! Don also gave some details of his student career which for me conjured up a delightful illustration of the way someone exceedingly bright can get away with taking a while to get their intellectual feet under them, and for the graduate students, I hope, served to counterbalance some of the inevitable unconscious assumption that someone settled and successful must always have been that way.

From the graduate side the most memorable revelation came from Gordon who transferred here from a graduate school which I will tactfully refrain from naming, where the faculty seemed uniformly to regard mathematics as work, and not very pleasant work at that, and the atmosphere was just what you would expect from that. Here he finds the atmosphere really great. "Why?", cried a beaming chorus of faculty members. He reeled off a list (aided by the others) which included departmental teas every day, and a lounge with blackboards all the way around and new publications on display (Don took note to put that on record – the university spacemongers have been eyeing that area) and a great spirit of cooperation in the first year courses (that’s a culture that’s been cultivated and nurtured in recent years.) The only way we could improve would be to imitate Brown, where they have a covered walkway between the math department and the cafeteria and a universal habit of lunching together there. Right. Oh, yes – another improvement: re-hang the Milliman portraits that are around the corner from the rest. A consortium of graduate students decided that together yesterday evening. Yes, the lounge really does provide a good hanging-out spot!

Leah then launched us into the Issues part of the evening by bringing up the 15-credit rule, which is unambiguously a pain for second and third year students. Jack expressed firm agreement, and gave a comprehensive explanation of why it couldn’t simply be zapped, starting with the fact that the number of faculty positions is tied to the number of credit hours generated. He hasn’t given up on it, though, and has a definite project in mind, which he is working on. And while I am on Jack’s past and present projects, I shall mention a couple of others that came up, even though I suspect they arose later in the evening. One is to make more connections between us and industry, and make it clear to present and prospective students that academia is not the only available market for newly minted math Ph.D.’s. Industry, in fact, very much likes what we produce, with the one caveat that lack of a computer language bothers them. So we are looking into that (maybe permit the substitution of a computer language for a spoken one in the language requirement?) Another project, now a fait pretty much accompli, was actually triggered at one of the previous PFF dinners. It’s a special Masters program admission which says "We think you are quite smart, but your preparation is a little weak, so we would rather you didn’t hurl yourself directly under the wheels of the Ph.D. program. Please get off to this slightly lower pressure start, and then if all goes well we will shepherd you onward." Leah, now firmly en route to a doctorate, testified emphatically to the virtues of this diminution in initial pressure.

I think the entire rest of the discussion centered around prelims, research areas and limbo (it wouldn’t have been a real PFF dinner without limbo). Gordon launched that with a neatly provocative notion: "Prelims", said he, "should be eliminated completely." His underlying point was that having the gateway into being accepted as a researcher be a test of quick recall and an ability to think while the clock ticks is a drastic misalignment. This produced a whole range of responses, including an interesting revelation of discrepancy in the opinions of faculty members present as to what constitutes a good prelim. That’s being discussed, of course. But it also gave the students an insight into the reasons the prelims are never carbon copies of each other. Unpredictability, though, adds a lot of stress. Gordon’s idea is that everyone should spend the summer reviewing, as they do now before taking the prelim, but having reviewed they should then be free to go on to greener pastures. Among the greener pastures suggested, the one that struck me was that of a mini-research project, which for sure would be more pertinent to later research efforts than exam-taking. Discussion around these suggestion went lots of directions and included points like Ann’s that research takes a mathematical toolbox and prelims are intended to guarantee that the toolbox has the pertinent tools in it, and other people’s that reviewing for an exam you know you are not going to take is pretty psychologically demanding. Which is not to say that we all rallied round and defended prelims to the hilt. We brought up various charming alternatives, like four-hour orals, and bounced around a multitude of comments and constraints.

From somewhere in the midst of that cloud emerged yet one more issue: how, with or without prelims, is a student who has polished off all the basics supposed to connect with a thesis area? (Limbo strikes again!) How can she or he know what it is to do research in the areas of specialty of the various members of the math faculty? We had a series of Friday afternoon Faculty Fora going, with pizza and socializing to follow, and they started off doing very nicely (yet another inspiration from a PFF dinner.) Unfortunately the pizza began dominating the scene – instead of being the drawing card that would motivate someone in doubt to go on and listen to the lecture, it began to pull people in directly . In fact, the selection was particularly good if one skipped the lecture and went straight for the provender. Not the plan. So this year the pizza went. But either that or a necessary change in schedule produced a very low turn-out for this week’s. Furthermore there has been a low turn-out lately of faculty volunteering to speak. Disheartening. Don offered to revive the pizza, which might help.

Towards the end of the conversation, as a sort of minor note, the comment was made that it is too bad colloquia are in general incomprehensible. We discussed for a while our constant efforts to induce speakers to produce a lecture that someone other than their two closest colleagues can follow. Pressure has also been put on said close colleagues, who are presumably sponsoring the guest in question, to induce him/her to be clear. No go. Jed mentioned some context in which speakers led in with a fifteen minute "pre-talk", setting the scene for the talk itself. We talked briefly about the possibility of trying to persuade our speakers to do that, but it didn’t seem a very likely prospect.

And then someone, or possibly someseveral in combination, had a stroke of genius. How about if on the day before the colloquium we have a full hour talk in which the speaker’s host or hostess outlines the field from which the research arose, thereby simultaneously introducing graduate students to the research field in question and making it at least conceivable that they should be able to follow the next day’s colloquium. A notion so exciting that even the pizza got forgotten. Watch for Results on this one!