You know, first-year me thought that I would be sufficiently
educated by now. First-year me thought that fourth-year me would definitely have
this whole life thing all figured out. I’ve found that no one ever truly does.
I won't miss midnights spent in Middlesex College, but I
will miss MC 105A. I won't miss the exams and the balancing game and the
impossible assignments and the structures that don't exist outside of your mind,
but I will miss the beauty of mathematics. I will miss Western. I will miss
home.
For the last time, here’s a sardonic listicle on what the university
experience taught me about people and places and finding independence (and even
a little bit of math).
I dedicate this one to my fellow 2016 grads.
~
o1. Be invested in the people around you. If you have to spend
so much time with them, you might as well enjoy their existence.
o2. Numbers without narrative are not insightful.
o3. It is far better to be fake-polite than genuinely rude.
o4. You honestly just cannot avoid linear algebra.
o5. Sometimes, the trade-off is your pride for your sanity.
Choose wisely.
o6. Sometimes you can just rephrase the same wrong thing in a
different way, and it will work.
o7. Stop asking your female friends when they will get married
or pregnant. They are more than their reproductive organs.
o8. People genuinely want to see you succeed. And if they don't,
you need new people in your life.
o9. Data is rarely organized in nice little tables that enable
you to run nice little SQL queries on it.
1o. You really can’t go wrong with eggs, fruit, cardio and
coffee.
11. But goldfish crackers make everything better.
12. Everything is either linear algebra or a form of the Heat
Equation.
13. The kind of people who need to worry about being socially
eloquent are not the ones who are worrying about it.
14. There is never going to be a moment when you realize that
you are, indeed, an adult. It creeps up slowly.
15. You truly are never going to please everyone, so prioritize.
16. You really can't just cut off the top of your data set to
fit the narrative. Keep your data scientists accountable, friends.
17. You cannot ask someone else to care about their own life. It
is a choice that they must make for themselves.
18. Avoid the temptation to start with a for loop. Make your
code run right just once first. Am I the only one with this problem?
19. You can't even eat canned
food if you don't have a can opener.
2o. There should exist a grocery store for single people.
21. Always send PDFs.
22. You are harder on yourself than anyone else is.
23. But seriously, don't try to build a 60,000 timestep Monte
Carlo simulation the night before it's due.
24. You can write anything you want in terms of Fourier series.
25. Sweatpants are still kind of really not okay.
26. The real world is not a meritocracy!
27. You are more credible if you write in LaTeX, even if you're
actually wrong. (I write this as I sit in MC105A at some ridiculous hour,
LaTeXing a numerical analysis lab which may or may not just be wrong.)
28. People write the most when they're at their saddest.
29. Stop talking about how busy you are all the time. It makes
you a boring person.
3o. Buying someone coffee is the cheapest way to get a mountain
of advice.
31. Good ideas get better when articulated successfully.
32. Don't take Costco for granted.
33. One day, people will start asking you for advice, because
they think you know what you're doing, even if you don't.
34. To my mentor: you have
been extraordinary, and I promise to pay it forward.
35. Learning mathematics first will make you a better coder
later on.
36. If you're going to learn to program, don't start with
MATLAB.
37. Don't take anything from strangers while walking downtown in
a major city. Nothing good comes out of it.
38. And while you're at it, stop being so damn trusting of
people in general.
39. Despite what they told you in first year, object-oriented
programming is not always better.
4o. Develop an appreciation for Numpy.
41. Your professors have hearts. It might be hard to tell,
though.
42. Just because you grew up in the church doesn't mean that you
have to take everything it preaches at face value. Think critically.
43. Don't you dare call yourself "pro-life" if you don't care
about the life of the mother in question. (P.S. I am pro-choice and I'm not sorry)
44. Cruise ships are miserable places. They are the closest
things to modern day slavery.
45. A good coat of mascara makes the girl.
46. Strong female role models are a necessity, but that's not to undermine the value of a good male role
model. Everyone has something to teach you.
47. Sometimes, all you need is to spend a weekend drinking
delicious overpriced coffee and reading in a sunny room.
48. You would be surprised at how far you can get just by asking
nicely.
49. Computer science is about writing code just as much as
mathematics is about adding large numbers a lot of times very quickly. (i.e. Not
at all.)
5o. If there are norm functions involved, you can probably just
proceed formally. (i.e. Manipulate symbols until you've proved your theorem.)
51. Of all the things in life that are mediocre, love should not
be one of them.
52. Someone else's success does not diminish your own.
53. Keeping in mind, however, that we cannot all be heroes.
54. "Bounded" is not a real word outside of the math
world. Books are not bounded; they are bound.
55. PSA: The man's name is pronounced "oil-er."
56. The goal is not always to do the most things. It is to
maximize the number of things which you can do well.
57. Lightning has to strike somewhere.
58. Don't aim for creativity. Aim for curiosity, and creativity
(and inspiration) will follow naturally.
