Legibility
“Professor, why do we use this symbol? It’s so difficult to write.†“Oh, you’ll get used to it after writing it a thousand times!â€
Author: jeremy
Discounting
I am very good at finding the bad aspects of any given idea or thing. I wouldn’t call myself cynical. Rather, I have a tendency to find ways to justify not doing something. This has to do with my reluctance to try new things, and I suspect I’m not the only one who does this. Imagine the following scenario. You’re presented with an amazing opportunity, but there is something you have to do. Maybe you…
No Distractions
It feels so strange to think that you used to go to a library to search for these papers instead of having easy(-ish) access online.
Foundations
Control of the Future
It’s tempting as a student to think that nothing is in your control. We often feel like our whole lives revolve around the whims of professors and their decisions for assignments and tests. It can be easy to retreat into “reactive†mode, making sure that everything which is thrown at you gets done. When we operate like this, we tend to be exhausted, since we can never look further than a week. The issue with…
Experiment Public Relations
Slick Versus Pedagogical Proofs
In mathematics, there’s almost always an opportunity to make proofs more concise. For example, when you first learn a concept, it might take a while to prove a result using the definitions that were developed. The reason it’s longer to do is because the definitions require you to spell out ideas explicitly. As a result, you might get to the end of the proof, but it takes a bunch of little intermediate steps to do…
Excited
This might sound like a rare problem, but it happens more than you might think. In particular, I see it when professors start rattling off long theorems that they know by heart.
Obscure
Levelling Up
We enjoy doing comfortable things. We don’t want to stretch ourselves too much, because when you stretch, there’s a possibility of overstretching. We fear this potential negative, so we buck the other way, contenting ourselves with doing activities and pursuing projects that aren’t too risky. It’s not that we don’t want to do better work and overcome new challenges. Ask anybody around you if they want to overcome challenges, and their answer will be “yesâ€.…
