0106. Tracing Back

tldr: moving forward

I haven’t written in a while.

I’ve been thinking about why I even started this blog in the first place. I knew that I wanted a way to encapsulate (albeit a small fraction of) my time at MIT. I wanted to document, someway somehow, my time in undergrad. It was either making this blog with a URL I spent precisely 2 seconds thinking about, or going out and buying a camcorder to make videos that I would never get around to editing.

But really, at the end of the day, what got me to sit down, make a WordPress account, and actually write, was the prospect of being a blogger for MITAdmissions. There are a thousand different reasons why this is the case, 999 of which I won’t go into right now, but the one that has been on my mind most recently is the audience.

I feel like I don’t know who my audience is anymore. Not, as in, “Who will ever read this?”, because that’s a question I’m frankly uninterested in. Moreso, as in, “How should I be framing my experiences?”

Maybe it’d be helpful to ground what I am saying with an example.

Right now, I am a masters student in mathematics at the University of British Columbia. As a consequence, some of the biggest things that have been on my mind have been revolving around math. I mean, it’s my fucking job now (isn’t that so cool!!). But when I think about writing about all the various math things I’ve been thinking about, I sort of… shut down?

Like, maybe! Let’s say I’m writing for high schoolers. I could absolutely write about the type of math I study (to some extent) for high school students. Hell, I did that for one of my final Admissions posts. But while I could write about the mathematics behind my graduate school experience, it’s not how I want to be spending my time writing. I want to spend my time writing about my graduate school experience, which just so happens to be effected by the culture surrounding mathematics.

And while I’d like to think that “17 year old Paige” would benefit from reading such posts, it just feels really really daunting to think about all the caveats and background I would need to put into my writing to make it accessible for my 17 year old self. It feels like every post would include paragraph after paragraph along the lines of: “I’ve been feeling this way in graduate school; feelings which, to be clear, are affected by my experiences in undergrad; experiences which, to be clear, took my a long time to learn how to navigate; and, to be clear, figuring out how you want to navigate those experiences looks different for everyone depending on background and …”

AND I KNOW—
I know I could just ignore the urge to add those caveats in. I could just get to the point of writing along the lines of “I’ve been feeling this way in graduate school.” But then, am I really writing for high school students? And which high school students are benefitting from reading such posts? Because I know that before undergrad, graduate school seemed mystical to me. The concept of being a graduate student seemed so far beyond comprehension that (I fear) reading a post without said caveats would feel…

Like that could never be me.

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Every now and then at MIT, I’d talk to someone about my timeline through college mathematics courses from high school and undergrad. How, e.g., in the span of my junior spring to senior spring, I went from trigonometry to differential equations. And the thing– the thing I would always try to stress, is that I took things when they made sense for me to take them. I took calculus 1, and then calculus 2, and then calculus 3, and then satisfied the prerequisites to take differential equations.

The same became true in undergrad: I took differential analysis 1 (18.155) my sophomore year at MIT, which feels wild from an outside perspective, until you realize that the previous semester I had taken functional analysis, which I only felt comfortable taking because in the previous semester I took real analysis, which I only felt comfortable taking because I had a background with some light proof experience and a “go get ’em” attitude.

I could always find the path between “Where I am Now” (which is generally ‘a better mathematician than I ever thought I could be’, which is a low bar to beat) to “Where I was Then” (which is generally ‘someone who feels so woefully lost about what the fuck mathematics even is’).

The same is true now in graduate school. I get to explore cool problems in a field called harmonic analysis, but the only reason I got to this point was because my freshman year of undergrad I emailed Larry Guth (who will now be my PhD advisor when I go back to MIT) and said “I’d like to learn more analysis; what do you suggest” (in, y’know, more or less words).

And I don’t know why, but this ability to trace my research experiences back just doesn’t feel so comforting to my “high school age self” as the ability to do the same with my classes. The progression in classes feel natural: if you satisfy the prerequisites, just give it a shot. The coursework may feel intense, but you gotta learn it at some point, right?

The progression to research to “17 year old Paige” just feels… intangible. Intractable. Unrealistic. Like, in high school, I could never in a thousand years imagine that I would be where I am today, and no amount of “tracing back” would convince me otherwise.

So what does that mean in terms of writing? I don’t know. I don’t think it should mean that I stop writing; but it does (to me at least) mean that I shouldn’t and can’t try to cover all my bases. I can’t end every sentence with a note that says “my experiences are mine and your’s may look different but hopefully you find some comfort in hearing what I go through regardless.” But I also don’t want to be completely insensitive to the fact that where I am in math/life has been so utterly affected by:

• Being an alum of the IHTFP institution.
• Being older.
• Being given opportunities at the right time and the right place.

But the list above are, in some sense, happenstance. For example, with the list above, I could already add a thousand caveats and end every sentence with the statement “Note that my understanding of the undergraduate curriculum/culture was affected my where I went for my undergraduate studies” or “Note that my understanding of this scenario is largely affected by simply being older”, but the same is true for nearly every person. Maybe, as a result, it’s just worth letting those types of things affect my writing less.

Maybe it’s worth giving more weight to the parts of my background that aren’t true for nearly every person:

• Being a lesbian woman in math.
• Being the first academic in my family from a low-income background.
• Being an educator and an optimist and a kind person first, and a mathematician second.

Maybe this is the way to move forward.

Because, to be clear, I do want to keep moving forward in my writing. I just, don’t know what I want that to look like yet. But maybe, right now, I’m too zoomed in to a much bigger picture– a bigger picture that will reveal itself with time and “go get ’em” attitude towards continuing to blog.

I guess the only way to find out is to start writing and start zooming out.