October 30, 2000. Diners were Jim King, Jack Lee, Don Marshall, John Palmieri and Ginger Warfield, faculty, and Davis Doherty, Amy Ehrlich, Panki Kim and Keir Lockridge, graduate students.

Dinner #8 was marked by a singular absence of burning issues, which made for a thoroughly pleasant conversation, somewhat lowish in key. Even the issue of the graduate student strike which is being voted on tomorrow, while it brought about various interesting facets of the discussion, didn't have any notable affect on the assembled blood pressures.

Amy brought up the first of the evening's topics, which returned to become one of the last as well, in the course of answering our questions about why (very much to our pleasure) she is much happier here than she was a few years back when she started her graduate studies at the University of Maryland. In part it had to do with living in or near College Park, MD (Seattle is a hard act to precede) but also in part to very poor coursework advising. It seems they have a system under which all of the advising of new graduate students is carried out by more advanced graduate students, and hers failed to register that one of her three courses was way over her head, and another way under it. One direction this led was advising, and the issue of how a faculty advisor can be of most use to an advisee. Nobody's got that quite figured out, though we have in our department one impressive example in the form of someone who has his advisees come in each week with one interesting problem or theorem from each course being taken. Another direction, taken much later, was mentors: would it be nice for new graduate students to be taken under the wings of more advanced ones, provided they weren't the ones solely responsible for course selections? Strong positive reaction, and Jack noted that it is just the kind of thing the VIGRE grant is aiming for, which might in some way be pertinent.

Davis'es self-introduction also brought up an issue: he commented on how much he is looking forward to getting to the stage where he is not so focused on grades -- specifically on a 3.8. The others all assured him that it was indeed an excellent state. Then there ensued a fascinating discussion of dealing with the 3.8 rule, which permits the omission of one prelim on the basis of a grade of 3.8 in the course whose content is being examined on that prelim. Jack remarked with some distress that one of the consequences is that after a grade of 3.7 students tend to throw their mental resources into getting a 3.8 in something else. What I found entertaining, though, was the students' discussion of the gamesmanship involved. Obviously, if you have a strong field, that is the one in whose course you are most likely to achieve your 3.8. On the other hand, that is also probably one you would particularly enjoy digging into in preparation for a prelim, so in some sense you are shooting yourself in the foot if you get yourself exempted from it. Tricky question!

One subject which has dominated the conversation at all previous dinners went very mildly by in slightly disguised form. Keir is indeed at the just-post-prelim stage which has often been so labeled, but at least for the moment his concern just came forth in the form of a plaint that mathematics is too full of interesting areas, which makes thesis choice difficult. A decidedly positive spin. Less positive was his reaction to the fact that he can't get the commutative algebra course that would be very helpful for his current algebraic geometry course because it is not being given this quarter. Jack gave a brief exposition of how selections are made, which proved highly interesting to the rest of us.

Somewhere along in there, inevitably, The Strike Issue arose. After a bit of technical discussion of what's needed to produce the strike and what the strike is capable of producing, we got into some discussion of working conditions elsewhere, not to mention what working conditions here might become if the legislature were to get its hands on the details of arranging them. At Maryland some incoming first year students have full responsibility for a course.In fact, I seem to remember for two, but I've gone incredulous on that. At Rochester, Davis was TAing as a sophomore, including writing and grading quizzes. This led us (I forget quite how) to some issues of homework grading. For one thing, Rochester won considerable enthusiasm from their students for setting up a WebWork program which permitted them to submit homework on the web and get instant feed-back. An interesting tactic, but part of the enthusiasm was generated by the fact that thitherto they had received no feedback on any homework, because there are no graders at all there. Not so good. (Panki pointed out at this point that homework for undergraduates really took him by surprise, because in Korea there is none. Just Big exams.) Don reported that we tried the WebWork briefly here, but so far it has not caused any loud cheers.

I think that's it. No proposals for saving the world, but then again no intimations that without some saving the world is about to self-destruct. A nice, mellow evening all round!