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Q&A Grad School Experience Year II Part IV
Morning y’all, here’s another installment of Q&A about my experiences studying towards a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Tennessee. This is a mix of thoughts and replies to questions about graduate school and life in academia adapted from some content I’ve written on Quora.
The previous installment in this series is linked here.
How long does it take the average person to become good at math?
The issue with this question is that “average person” is not a well-defined term, not to mention “good at math” is a very loose term. Many mathematicians, who do math for a living, consider themselves to not be good at math because they are among the most cognizant of all people in realizing there is so much more math than they can possibly absorb.
Also, the phrase “good at math” can be interpreted to mean:
- Number of math classes taken and passed
- Ability to solve problems
- Ability to talk about math with others
- Ability to complete a math test in a certain amount of time
- Ability to create mathematics (i.e. do research)
For the vast majority of students, the ability to handle test problems quickly is the most interesting point, because most…