"On Life and Math", Chapter 3: A Big Berkeley Ocean (Part 1 of 2)
In my final year of undergrad, I applied to just four grad schools, all of them top-ranked: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. I knew on a logical level that I might not get into any of them; but I didn’t have a felt sense of the possibility of failure, having never truly undergone it before.1 After all, I’d conquered every challenge that had come across my path. Didn’t that make me The Best?
Of course, what I failed to see was what I failed to see: all the other kids out there, conquering substantially more impressive challenges. For instance, even though I’d done math research every summer, I hadn’t considered that there were other, more impressive summer math research experiences to be had.
I didn’t get into any of those grad schools. But I did succeed in my application for an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. In addition to being prestigious, this covers tuition, fees, and salary (around $30k/year at the time — substantially more than the typical grad student salary). For both of those reasons, it would serve as a boon to my grad school applications the next time around. This success gave me a sense of peace; more specifically, it staved off a fuller sense of failure.
I spent the interim year living in Berkeley with one of my best friends from college. I worked as a math tutor to pay the rent, and spent much of the rest of my time hanging out and sitting in on math classes at UC Berkeley. I was just doing math for the sheer joy of it, and altogether it was a really nice life.
My grad school applications the next time around were much more successful, and I ended up at UC Berkeley — which was great, since I’d already been investing in its math grad student community.
And what a community it was! The Berkeley math grad students were an eclectic bunch, and represented a much more diverse set of traits than the narrow “math nerd” archetype that largely encompassed my undergrad math community. It felt like almost everyone was eager to develop their non-mathematical identities: there were rock climbers; heavy drinkers; salsa dancers; ultimate frisbee enthusiasts; punks; psychonauts; political activists. Some were boisterous, others soft-spoken. But despite our differences, we were all united by our love for mathematics.
In retrospect, my early years in grad school at Berkeley were far and away my favorite period of my whole academic career: that in which I felt the strongest sense of community. Such a sense of community makes all the difference in the world.2 I remain struck by how delightful and unique it is — especially outside of academia! — to find belonging within a vivacious community of smart, interesting, and hardworking people.
It was at Berkeley, though, that my math-bestness began to slip…
This disbelief was despite the fact that one of my professors at Brown refused to write a letter for me in this application cycle: since I wasn’t taking the application process seriously, it wasn’t a good use of his time. (As I now know from experience, writing recommendation letters (or at least good ones) takes a lot of work!) He was very kind and up-front about it, wishing me success nonetheless and remaining happy to write a letter if and when I took the application process more seriously (which I later did — and he did).
Towards assessing how universal this is, at some point I started asking mathematicians the following question.
Suppose you’re alone on a desert island for the rest of your life. You’ve got access to all the math books and papers in the world and you can do all the math you like, but you’ll never be able to share it with anyone. Would you keep doing math?
I’ve asked this many times, and I have yet to find a single mathematician who answers “yes”.