michael_cain's Journal: Math Camp

The Economics Department at the University of Colorado requires all incoming graduate students to pass a two-week "math camp" before starting their first semester classes. As my friend who is a former faculty member explains it, graduate level economics is heavy on math and their biggest concern about people they admit is that they don't have the math ability required. Another of the professors that I talked to described the first year of graduate economics as the worst year of his life, because of the difficulty that he had with the math (apparently he found an area of specialization that did not require math on an ongoing basis). The department made copies of last year's math camp final available to incoming students. While I'm certainly rusty, and didn't have the economics context for a couple of the problems, none of it involved math that I hadn't seen before.

This year's math camp played to my strengths. By negotiation between the professors teaching the first semester classes, and the graduate student teaching the camp, the emphasis was on real analysis and reading and writing proofs. I loved real analysis when I took it as an undergraduate many years ago. And I loved optimization, which depends heavily on analysis, when I took that in graduate school. And I enjoy sitting down for an afternoon of developing a proof for a useful theorem. Given a continuous function defined on a compact domain, prove...

I'm afraid the instructor may have set me up for a certain amount of grief in the coming year. During the review session, he had put something up on the blackboard, then turned to the class, looked at me, and asked, "Mike, is that right?" I told him that I thought it was, and he added, "I like having Mike in the class, he keeps me honest. You should all get to know Mike." I'm already an odd person out since I'm twice as old as most of the new graduate students. I'm not sure that I want to be a resource that the people having trouble with math turn to automatically.

Anyway, I passed the math camp final exam, so that's one more hurdle out of the way. This is an off week for me. The new TAs have a certain amount of training that they have to complete this week, but I'm not teaching this term. The graduate student organization (union?) is running a variety of orientation sessions for new people, but those seem to be concerned with how to find a place to live in Boulder and what to do on Friday nights. My big chores this week are to straighten out health insurance premiums (Comcast neglected to pass their service agent all the information about the benefits and payment schemes those of us who retired under an AT&T plan are entitled to) and getting my son installed in a dormitory in Greeley for his sophomore year at the University of Northern Colorado.