Back To School

I decided to go back to school and am well on my way. I was accepted to Florida State University and offered a teaching assistantship, which was replaced by the GAANN Fellowship. I will be pursuing a PhD in Applied/Computational Mathematics, which should take 4 or 5 years. I officially begin in Fall 2008. This year I will take Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Partial Differential Equations, Methods of Applied Math, as well as some seminars. Because of the fellowship, I won't be teaching this year, which is awesome! I'll have much more time to focus on my studies.

I actually started this summer to get a head start on things. I took Complex Variables (MTWRF) because I'd never had a class like that before and I need to know it for the second semester of Foundations of Computational Mathematics. I also took Engineering Mathematics 2 (MWF) for exposure to Partial Differential Equations. Both classes actually met at the same time of the day, so on MWF, I had to decide which class I was going to. As an added bonus (note the sarcasm), Engineering Mathematics 2 began at the beginning of the summer, so I had to catch up on everything. Despite all of this conflict, I did rather well in both classes and most definitely passed them.

Right now, I have a break before Fall classes begin. I'm a bit nervous like I always am before a new term. I'm also a little confused as to whether I'm affiliated with the Mathematics Department or the School of Computational Science or both. I guess at the moment it doesn't matter. I also need to speak with professors to try to figure out what types of things I might be interested in studying. So far, I like PDE's, but I've only had a little exposure.

I also have yet to meet a single student in my program. This will probably change when all the rest of the new graduate students arrive. There will be approximately 40 of them to add to about 13 of us who started this summer. Hopefully when everyone gets here there will be some sort of "meet and greet" so that we can at least meet. I've already met some of the old graduate students, but definitely not nearly all of them.