Saturday, December 04, 2004

Thoughts as the Term Ends ..

The semester soon ends. This should be a good thing, but I'm still advisor-less, or as I like to put it, an "academic orphan." I've thought about possible candidates but still haven't talked to either of them. It either means that I'm lazier than I had thought, or more gutless than I had thought.

A month ago my undergraduate advisor had jokingly assured me that I could always come back and work with him .. at least, I thought he was joking. It was nice of him to say, at any rate.

On the other side of things, I think I'm making the most of "orphan" life.

At the expense of the chaos that is this semester's coursework and teaching, I've managed to attend a few conferences and think about a few research problems. A joint paper might be in the works, and another in the future: they will concern partial differential equations on a particular type of control manifold.

Partial differential equations. It seems like a dirty word amongst the pure mathematicians in my department .. well, except the PDE people. More and more it makes me wonder if I'm in the right place, or if I'm interested in the right things.

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