Dinner on April 7, 2008

Diners:

Graduate students Michael Goff, Catherine Williams, Josh Tokle, Megan McCormick, Robert Bradshaw

Faculty members Dan Pollack, Steffen Rohde, William Stein, Ginger Warfield

Future Graduate Student (we hope!) SonyaLeibman

Absent for health reasons was Selim Tuncel, which gave us a chance to say nice things about him and his chairmanship.

After several dinners that somehow never got written up, suddenly we had one where the conversation was as lively as ever, but somehow sufficiently coherent to make it absurd not to write it up, at least briefly. So here goes.

I think a key element to the success of the conversation was Dan’s genuine curiosity, arising from the fact that he has just started in as Graduate Advisor. So when the food ordering and the introductions were over and the customary expectant pause ensued Dan unhesitatingly dropped into it the question “What about the qualifying exams?” It was a long time before the next pause. The first issue was “Why just once a year?” For that one I made use of my longevity: when I first came in the early 70’s they happened twice a year, and one result was that for the second half of winter quarter Padelford was full of ambulatory stress-baskets for whom course-work became increasingly irrelevant. Of course, it was also true that it was an all-or-nothing deal, so unless you passed all three of them in fall, you had to take all three over. Much has happened since then, including de-coupling the passes, and adding the option of “3.8ing” one subject. There’s even a slightly obscure one (at least it didn’t sound as if the graduate students knew about it) whereby someone who has agreed to advise a student’s thesis can give him/her a reading course that culminates in an open oral exam with other faculty members attending. The mention of oral exams struck a chord with Steffen, whose academic background in Germany included many such. He commented that if you can get the student to relax and just discuss the mathematics you can find out more about their real mathematical competence than several hours of written exam may supply. A very cogent point, though the art of getting the students to relax is a non-trivial one. From there, the conversation swirled though numerous variations on the theme of prelims. Faculty members were startled to hear of heavy speculation among the students about who would be writing each exam, based on evidence like who runs the summer review course. Of course, they never find out for sure which speculation was correct, but that doesn’t slow it down. After all, they’re into problem-solving, right?

I got the impression that a number of potentially useful ideas went by in the midst of the very interesting batch of comments and suggestions. However, since I am not (thank goodness!) the Graduate Advisor, I didn’t have to take note of which ones they were!

The other good question that was presented came, appropriately enough, from the Graduate Student Representative. Michael asked why we don’t have alternate year courses in some topics officially listed, since they always seem to turn up. Turns out that one has a pretty straightforward answer: once you jump through all the hoops required for getting a course into the catalogue by name, you have settled yourself neatly into a straightjacket as regards how many quarters it lasts and what the syllabus is for each quarter and a smallish change in the interests of the faculty members teaching it can be hard to accommodate. Better we keep calling them Special Topics – but maybe we need to make sure the appropriate level graduate students are kept apprised of them.

As we polished off that question, we also polished off the last of a quite impressive amount of food, so we decided it was time to sort out our shoes and head out into the evening.