When I started graduate school, I found myself in an unexpected minority: I was the only student in my cohort of 12 who had gotten my math major at a small liberal arts college. Everyone else had gone to a university, and many had already taken graduate level courses.

I had never questioned my decision to study math at a liberal arts institution. I loved the fact that my classmates and friends (and professors!) had such varied interests, such as the classics, philosophy, music, and art, and that these subjects were often woven together into interdisciplinary courses. I appreciated my small classes that fostered conversation with classmates and close contact with professors. I didn’t realize what I could have benefited from at a larger school: a deeper pool of math classes (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) from which to choose, as well as graduate students who I could look up to, learn from, and emulate.

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