Hi all,
This week I’m here to tell you about an unlikely mathematical community that you might be interested in, particularly if you’re interested in applying to grad school, or if you’re a grad student wondering about life after grad school.
Perhaps surprisingly, the community that I’m talking about is /r/math, a subreddit on reddit.com. And the reason that you might be interested is because /r/math will be holding a Graduate School Panel starting from October 21st, 12pm Eastern.
At this panel, graduate student volunteers will be answering your questions and sharing their perspectives and opinions about graduate school, the application process, and beyond. There will also be a handful of panelists that can speak to the graduate school process outside of the US. In addition, there will also be postdocs, professors, and graduates in industry that can speak to what happens after you earn your degree. Furthermore, there are also panelists that have taken non-standard paths to math grad school, that are in grad school in related fields (such as computer science), or have taken unique opportunities in grad school!
Of course, this is a panel comprised mostly of graduate student volunteers, and don’t have much insight into the admissions process. However, this is a valuable resource to ask questions and chat with current grad students in a variety of schools and subject areas.
So again, the panel will run for about two weeks starting from October 21st, 12pm Eastern. It’s also bi-annual, so keep an eye out for the panel again in March, when US grad schools have begun to send out admissions decisions.
Disclosure: I’m a moderator of /r/math (which is even less interesting than it sounds), and I am running the panel.
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For those of you not familiar with reddit, it is a link aggregator website perhaps best known for posting memes and gifs. Notably, once you’ve created an account, you can also discuss and comment on specific posts.One main feature is that instead of looking at all of reddit at once, you can join smaller communities (known as subreddits), and look at and discuss content related to that community (such as /r/math).
In particular, on /r/math there will often be links and discussions about math news articles, educational videos, recent papers, etc. Some of the other content on /r/math include weekly discussions such as the Simple Questions discussion thread, a Career and Education Q&A thread, and a What Are You Working On? thread for discussing the mathematics that you have been thinking about.
Another thread to watch out for is an upcoming AMA thread with Brendan Fong and David Spivak on October 24th, 2PM EST, where you can ask questions to these two mathematicians.
So if you feel like having an excuse to perform some mathematical procrastination, join in the discussion over on /r/math!
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