By Diana Davis
I absolutely love being a math graduate student. I can’t imagine a better job — they pay me to take math courses, teach calculus to motivated college students, and think about interesting cutting-edge research problems! What could be better than that?

As it turns out, though, not every math grad student is as happy as I am. As a recent Harvard Crimson article discussed, it’s possible to be extremely unhappy in even the most renowned of educational institutions. If you don’t want to be a math grad student, that’s okay. Plenty of people leave math grad school and go on to do great things. In my program and others, people have:
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By Brian Simanek

Many mathematicians, both students and faculty, are constantly looking for ways to become more effective teachers.  I have attended TA training sessions but much of the instruction was devoted to rules and policies and not effective teaching.  I have also been to conference presentations devoted to teaching mathematics where much of the content was devoted to teaching tools (e.g. MATLAB) or how to help students that are struggling.  However, I think there is much to be gained by sharing ideas on how to teach a specific topic.

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