My graduate student career is drawing to a close, and as such this will be my final post to this blog as a graduate student. \u00a0In this post, I want to share some brief words of wisdom that have been very helpful to me when making important decisions over the past five years. \u00a0During my graduate student orientation, I attended many information sessions on a variety of topics, but the one memorable comment was made by an experienced graduate student (not in mathematics) who said to all of us “you are an exceptional student but you are probably not the exception.”<\/p>\n
As an undergraduate, being an exceptional student is being the exception. \u00a0A typical undergraduate student body consists of students with a diverse set of talents, both academic and non-academic. \u00a0Those that excel in math (for example) and choose to pursue it professionally are characteristically atypical and, as such, expect themselves to assume atypical amounts of responsibility and endure atypical levels of adversity. \u00a0The experienced student’s words of wisdom to us were meant to caution us beginners that in graduate school this would no longer be the case. \u00a0Being a good student no longer makes a student exceptional in graduate school.\u00a0 Almost all graduate students were exceptional undergraduate students, and all of them share a certain devotion to their particular field of study.<\/p>\n
The student’s advice has been very helpful in both making decisions and defining my expectations as a graduate student. \u00a0For example, when enrolling in courses each term, I aimed to strike a balance between learning interesting math through coursework and making time for research.\u00a0 It is always tempting to sign up for every interesting course I see, but I remembered this student’s advice and realized that the most successful advanced graduate students in my department were often enrolled in very few courses and it seemed unlikely that I was an exception to this phenomenon.\u00a0 The student’s advice is meant to encourage students to emulate those who came before them with similar ambitions.\u00a0 As graduate students, we are in charted waters and have available to us the advice and experience of mentors whose success we hope to achieve.<\/p>\n
If I had to add my own advice on graduate school based on my own experience, it would be simply this: work as hard as you can.<\/p>\n