I was up before 5:30 yesterday morning, which is really early for me, after a long, stressful dream involving a realization that I am totally unprepared for a very public presentation exam, disappearing notecards, disappearing Tam, confusion about suddenly finding myself at home instead of at the testing site, and so forth. It was something of a relief to wake up.
Starting at 8:00, I had my two back-to-back math finals. I think I did well on both of them and generally believe that I had studied an appropriate amount. (Technically, I "overstudied" what I needed to eke out A's on the tests, let alone A's in the classes, but my goal was more like "score very solid A's on both exams.")
After that, I talked to my professor MW who is going to be my boss at my summer job, an algebra curriculum development program. The details of the job are still a bit nebulous at this point, but will involve laying out a book with desktop publishing software and learning to use the LaTeX program for writing mathematical stuff (which I have never used). (MW does not know about my relatively large amount of editing experience, but I will have the opportunity to put my mad skillz to work.) There are also summer math camps that I will help with. It sounds like it will be fun and different from my usual kind of gig. It's 8 weeks, 40 hours per week, $10 per hour, starting June 9.
Last night I went out to conduct experiments for my marketing department job. I was extremely tired and just about totally brain-fogged at this point, but it turned out okay. Two professors, the grad student who is the primary research assistant, and I put 20 Boy Scouts through the relatively painless process of picking food from mocked up fast food menus and answering questions. I drove myself and the grad student to the site, and having him in the car definitely helped keep me awake. The guy is a great example of the very best kind of extrovert - just naturally friendly, interested in other people, a good conversationalist, and pleasant to be around. He is an MBA student, focusing on sales; I can only imagine that he will be extremely successful.
He said that he has been always been extroverted, and related this story that his mom likes to tell: He was 4, and had been to one of those "Mom's Day Out" programs, and when he got home, his mom asked him what he had learned. He told her all about the "don't talk to strangers" lesson they had had. Immediately following this, they went to the grocery store together. While standing in the check-out line, his mom realized he was no longer standing with her. She looked over and saw him sitting on a bench with a totally unfamiliar old guy (about 75 years old) having an animated conversation. As they were leaving the store, she said, "Don't you remember that you aren't supposed to talk to strangers?" and he responded, "But Mom, he isn't a stranger. That's Charlie!" Even at that young age, he already had the "A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet" mentality, it seems. I wish that at 34 years old, I was a fraction this socially confident and adept.
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I don't know how to use LaTex either, but an interesting note: both of my boyfriends who were working on their master's theses (Hans and Ed, for those keeping track at home) were doing so in LaTex. The default (I guess) font for it looks familiar and happy to me.
(I've done extensive reading of Ed's many drats, and I copy-edited Hans's thesis on paper, so I spent a lot of time with both.)
One of the interesting things about LaTex is that it uses something like a markup language (like html except totally different) to render things, rather than being a WYSIWYG editor like Word or whatever. People who use it seem to really like it.
I'm kind of envious.
"Drats" for "Drafts" above was a typo, not a Freudian slip, but is nonetheless rather appropriate to the whole thesis project. Hah.
I have only seen how LaTex looks "on paper" and not the way that it's written. Sounds even more interesting this way.
"Drats" is probably a pretty mild comment where theses / dissertation are concerned ;)
Another interesting LaTex recollection: Hans called it "lah-tech" with the "ch" sound like in German (only more like in Dutch, of course). I always assumed it was really called "latex," like the material condoms are made of, and that he just pronounced it in Dutch. But in fact, Ed also calls it "Lah-Tek" so I guess that's really it's name. Or else my boyfriend is just weird.
I knew the last syllable was "tek" or "tech" (depending on whether one can really do the Germanic ending) but was uncertain whether it was more "lah" or "lay" at the beginning. I'm willing to trust the collective Tam-boyfriend wisdom on this one.
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