You want to apply for a role. It’s the role you’ve always dreamed of. The role feels like it was crafted just for you. You know you’re the person for it. You get an interview. There, the person hiring asks you what you’ve done. You talk about how you spent many years at school, working hard and studying to be the best in your subject. You tell them about the awards you’ve received, the accolades…

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When we think about the future, I suspect many of us are limited by our previous experiences. In other words, we don’t consider the possibilities available to us because we can’t imagine them. Roughly speaking, this is what I would call “potential”. It’s the ability to achieve something that you haven’t already. It’s what people refer to when they see someone with a lot of talent that hasn’t been focused in one direction. We can…

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The naïve person thinks that being good at teaching means you know the material. While this is technically true, I think it hides the fact that knowledge of the material isn’t sufficient to be a good teacher. For the most part, having a good command of the material helps a lot in getting the information to the students. However, I think we too often make the mistake that knowing the material is good enough. It…

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I’ve enjoyed science and mathematics for a long time. I love the feeling of understanding a concept through its fundamental constituents. It feels like you’re getting at something deep, unavailable to those who just look over the topic with a cursory glance. In a sense, learning about science and mathematics has helped me learn how to think. As much as I might romanticize it though, there is no getting around the fact that learning is…

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I love proofs in mathematics. Getting to the heart of why something is true is a ton of fun. It’s even better when there is a nice and simple proof of a fact that is surprising. These are the proofs that I love the most, because they solve a mystery in a way that is easy to follow and makes sense the whole way. When first learning about proofs, I proved basic facts about numbers.…

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Imagine you’re walking through a forest for the first time. This forest has trails, so you follow one of them. Since the forest is unfamiliar to you, the only thing you have in mind for your walk is the destination. You know that if you follow the path correctly, you will get to where you were hoping to go when you checked the map at the welcome station. You’re moving along the path, and suddenly…

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When I find an activity that I enjoy, I have a tendency to think I should immediately do it. After all, how can I claim to like something if I don’t do it? Even if I have a lot on my plate, I feel like the only way to say I like an activity is to do it. But that’s not the only possibility. Instead of feeling the need to do everything that looks interesting,…

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I’ve always liked teaching others. I enjoy being able to connect with students, understand their struggles, and offer what I know as a way to help them make sense of a concept. My particular subjects of interest are mathematics and physics, but the real joy I get from teaching is simply being able to help others. Teaching has a fairly good reputation. It’s seen as a respectable profession. I don’t doubt that teachers do important…

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Learning a new subject in mathematics is always interesting. You learn new techniques to analyze problems and get to investigate the relationships between objects. Whether you’re learning about probability, algebra, geometry, or any other field, you will do these two things. The idea is to expand your toolbox to apply to various mathematical problems. That’s fine, but it’s not the reason that I enjoy mathematics. For me, it comes from a slightly different place. The…

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