Day 973 of 1000
Christian’s academic adviser, Dr. Sandra Paur, hosted a small ceremony yesterday to honor the graduating Mathematics Honors students at NCSU. Kelly was there and took the picture at the right when it was Christian’s turn. Dr. Paur talked a little bit about what each student had done and where they were going next. Because this was the math department, most of the students were going on to Math or Statistics degrees at an impressive array of schools. Christian was the only one going on to an Engineering degree.
We learned several interesting things from the event. First, many very big name schools value North Carolina Mathematics graduates. Several students were going on to PhD’s in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford and Berkeley. Several of those students had been awarded NSF grants for their Mathematics research at the undergraduate level. Almost all the students who had received those awards had spent their entire four years at NCSU and were better versed in the way the system works for those kinds of things than us. Some of the other students also were able to start sequences in their first two years that were not available to Christian at the community college, so he had to scramble the whole way through to get all the material he wanted. I still believe that the kids were profoundly better served for many reasons to have attended community college for their first two year, but I can see the benefit of learning and working within the system over the entire four years.
Secondly, all the other students who were going on to graduate school were continuing to Mathematics or Statistics degrees. That is great and I think Christian was a little torn about that. He would have loved to study more Mathematics. Still, in the case of both Kelly and Christian, their Mathematics and Statistics undergraduate degrees have served them extremely well in preparation for graduate work in other areas. I am very happy they studied Mathematics and Statistics and I am even happier they are going on to graduate degrees in other areas, Engineering and Business, where the application of the skills they learned will be applied to real world problems as opposed to the development of tools to apply to other people’s problems as is generally the case in Mathematics and Statistics research.
Finally, Dr. Paur let the cat out of the bag about Christian having skipped high school. I did not understand the extent to which Christian kept this a secret. I knew that Kelly had told their fairly small circle of friends at the beginning of this year and they were all pretty shocked. Kelly was in the room when Dr. Paur made the announcement and she said many of the professors there were very surprised with the revelation. I have never met Dr. Paur. I have tried to stay completely out of the way of the kids college education because I feel it is important that the kids “own” what they do at school. So I am very gratified that Christian has had such a stellar academic adviser. Dr. Paur is not only a great teacher, but was just perfect in the way she helped and guided Christian through his degree. I hope to meet her to express my thanks at the graduation.
Betty Blonde #104 – 12/09/2008
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