Discount on Textbooks

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Kareem Carr

Update. Left over discount codes: mathgradwilliamsmb, 50% off; mathgradmb, 15% off. Please feel free to use them.

The first fifteen people to email me at from a .EDU email account will receive a coupon code for 15% off textbooks at CampusBookRentals.com.

I hadn’t heard of this type of service before, but I think a lot of people would have use for rented textbooks.

For a long time, textbooks have been quite expensive and many students have been stuck with buying them for a lot and selling them back at a loss. So, it’s good to see some innovation on this front.

Anyway, when a representative of Campus Book Rentals contacted me and asked me if I’d like to set up a contest. I expected there might be some demand among the readers of the blog. There are very few rules to this contest. Just email me at the above email from a .EDU account and I’ll send you the 15% off coupon code if you are in the first fifteen. Good luck!

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New Employment Blog

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Kareem Carr

Sue Geller, a member of the Joint Committee on Employment Opportunity, has started a new blog for the AMS on employment. I think it’s a niche that is sorely in need of filling. Many people, especially in the mathematics community, are not familiar with all the employment possibilities available to people with a high amount of quantitative competence.

As a mathematics degree is not a professional degree in the same way as law or medicine, Mathematics students can be at as much of a loss for what to do after graduation as people who study philosophy or English literature. No offense to these groups of people, but mathematics is vastly more applicable and more in demand than the skills produced by persons in these other fields.

Sometimes with just a little investment in learning how to program or learning the basics of another field, one can make oneself vastly more marketable.

So, visit Sue’s blog, there’s bound to be a lot of interesting information on there.

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Are Mathematics Students Expected to Forgo Pure Mathematics?

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Jean Joseph

If a student is asked “What do you study?” and she answers “Mathematics,” it is likely that the next question is “Ah! What do you do with that?”. And if she does not find an immediate answer because this question has never been posed to her before or if she chooses not to answer because she does not feel she should justify her interest in mathematics, the pause that follows and the sense of expectation from her interlocutor that there should be an answer may suggest that she probably is wasting her time. Continue reading →

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Should Math Be Taught in Schools?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Tyler Clark

One of my professors (Dr. Autin) posted the following video on her Facebook page.

The video gave me a good chuckle. Perhaps some people really do have this attitude towards math. Does anyone experience attitudes like this in their daily life?

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Letting Students Leave Discussion

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Laura Zirbel

By Laura Zirbel

Summer session is challenging here at UCSB. Students take summer classes for one of two reasons:

  • They are responsible and are foregoing the beach and video games to get ahead in their studies, or
  • They failed the class, and need to make it up.

This creates a problematic situation. Part of the class is really ahead, and part of the class is holding on for dear life. In the past, I taught to the middle. This was still too slow for some and too fast for others. This summer I did something in discussion section I’ve never done before. Continue reading →

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