FoxAndChicken

I super didn't mean to do that! I have something like that too, within my field. I actually started off my personal statement in my apps with " When I tell people that I am a logic major, the most common response is to ask if I have heard of the one with the fox, the chicken and the bag of grain. Believe me, I have. " Likewise, my math friends get asked what arbitrarily large numbers multiplied together are. "Oh! You're a math major? I suck at math. . . . What's 43 times 5?" My favorite mineral is kyanite! I think I was given one my by crazy aunt who tells me about her fairies when I go to visit her, but it's super pretty.

Space rocks! Cool! I went to a lecture from a scientist that was part of that program that landed the mini-laboratory on a comet. It was awesome! (I was bribed into going to this because I took a super intro rocket science course and he offered extra credit for attending seminars around campus. Like a scavenger hunt for your grade.)

Hi! Welcome!

When I was thirteen my mom packed a bunch of stuff into the car and we drove to Maine for my birthday to go camping. The inflatable mattress deflated EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. I woke up every morning like Is this a fat joke?! (It was a cheap inflatable mattress.) What does a geologist do? I mean obviously that's like rocks, I think, but what kinds of research things do you do? What's your favorite mineral? O.o

rental skates

Backpacking? Like... Going into nature and stuff? That's super intense! . . . Sometimes I take the elevator when only going up one flight of stairs. Me and a backpack in nature would probably be no bueno.

Ohmygosh. What happened here? Eep. I took a law and philosophy course last semester that talked about race discrimination in academia, and had to deal with a lot of people throwing around these types of arguments. If anecdotal evidence is fair game, as it appears that that is the trend, here's mine: I'm half mexican, and my dad is an immigrant. I grew up unable to communicate with about half of my family, and I lived in a trailer park for the first eight years of my life before moving to a small apartment in a town where I was the only Mexicanish Latinaish person--in sixth grade people asked if I brushed my hair because I was the only one who had curly hair. At fourteen I decided to get a job, and I coded websites for ten dollars an hour while eating only ramen so that I could attend private school. I financed this entirely myself. Parental supervision wasn't super big because my mom is a cosmetologist who owns a small business, so she wasn't really home when I was growing up. Then, in college, I have worked three jobs for the past several years while living in an apartment made for one person with my dad and uncle. Sophomore year the university screwed up my financial aid and froze my account, so I couldn't register for classes and I stopped eating in order to make payments. I dropped to 104 lbs (for reference, this was a decrease of about twenty pounds), and pulled several all nighters. Because I'm a first generation college student (my mom didn't complete high school) I dealt with all of this while hearing things from my mom like "If it *really* mattered to you, you would just have a 4.0." and "Please help your sister with scheduling, but make sure she takes useful classes, not the crap you're taking." (I'm paying for college, I take the classes I want.) Now, senior year, I'm probably going to be shut out of graduate school, I'm going to find a job and reapply. And I know that if I had the amount of time to focus on my studies that many of my peers get (and they seem to have a lot of time to go out and drink and party), I could actually have a 4.0 and a stellar writing sample and a perfect GRE score. (I actually did get a 4.0 last semester.) Instead, I balance three jobs, leadership positions in Women in Math, I volunteer with a group that helps get more students interested in mathematics, and I'm taking six classes. (So basically, I pull a couple all nighters per week and drink coffee two to four times a day.) And if I don't get into graduate school, my response isn't going to be to complain that the system seems to hate me. Instead, I'm going to work harder to be an applicant they want to accept.

UMich squirrels will mostly all do this.

Some of you were accepted to UMich for things I think I recall. Just saying, our squirrels should be a selling point. http://m.imgur.com/H8zbZb4 I named this one Tree and today Tree gave me a hug. (In exchange for food obvs.)

I have better friends in the department, but gosh I didn't realize how ridiculous some of the people were. Thank you @dgswaim for making me laugh with your "How boring." XD I liken my field (logic) to being to humanities what math is to science. Worth studying in its own right, but also for making the arguments of other fields more convincing and rigorous. Also, a squirrel I named Tree gave me a hug today. So now I guess I'm a Tree-hugger. http://m.imgur.com/H8zbZb4

I think I've caught a bit of a depression bug, too. My "friends" have put me into a bit of a funk. The mathematicians I know have all found out many of their decisions and one who isn't actually applying for anything made a snarky comment like "You can sit at the grown up table when you've actually heard from graduate schools." And in an unrelated incident the next day, some other mathematicians wrote in the undergraduate math commons "No logic in this room please" and "Set Theory isn't a real math." I've been super depressed since then and unable to function normally.

I love Suits! Have you watched Scandal or HTGAWM?

Not joking, sadly. The school has a pretty system for that set up but last time I went their advice was to drop a class. Which I did and it didn't help at all. (What helped was the stimuli being removed—financial aid messed up and the university froze my account. It was a mess. Once it was sorted out I was fine.)

I've been lying on the floor in the math department for an hour. I'm starting to question whether I have actual depression. Is it depression if there's a known cause?

We can do ittttt.

I haven't heard either.

So, I don't want to be all "As a logic major" but... Reads like a troll.

It sounds like my school was like yours a lot! Sometimes in race and ethnicity boxes I was to write "ethnically confused." I wrote an angsty poem about it once, which is about the extent of my creativity. We did peer reviewing in a class like a week ago and I was like "Oh gosh. I don't know what I'll do if I have to grade essays in graduate school. I would want to fail so many people..."

I didn't understand commas or how they worked until I took Latin and learned about different types of clauses. O.o

Ohmygosh. When I went to high school I signed up for Spanish and went to the teacher and was like "Uh. Can I be in Spanish 2?" And she was like "Conjugate bailar." And I was like ". . . I don't know what conjugate means." And she's like "Like, bailo, bailas, baila, bailamos, bailan?" And I was like wut. So I was put in Spanish one. But the only thing I learned in Spanish one was some new vocabulary and what the word conjugate meant. (Because dude, I knew that I would said soy and I would say to you eres, but like I didn't know that was called something fancy.) So, like, eventually I started working ahead. By like the second year of me taking Spanish I was like 200 pages ahead of whatever my classmates were doing and she hands me a quiz on like the preterite or whatever and I fill it out and then the class scores like 12 percent average on it, and I got like a 98 or something. They were super upset and the teacher is like "Well, FoxandChicken managed to do it, why can't you?" And then they all hated me. Note: I can't actually speak much Spanish these days.

Hey! Another Latina in Michigan! Woah! How is that? I grew up in a small town in Michigan surrounded by corn, but my dad is from Mexico. It was weird. Like, people always tell me I'm basically just another white girl from Michigan, but then I go home any my uncle is watching telenovelas or listening to mariachi music. (Seriously, he does both of these fairly regularly and when I tell my friends they think I'm kidding or something.)

Ann Arbor!

It still has a cute twist! And the logic world is destroyed, so it's not like the happiest. But she escapes into the elevator and hits the 3 button and is back into her normal world, and as she's taking the stairs down, it becomes evident that it's an exact copy of her world, but they use three state logic. Things relating to my field have been really depressing me lately, so I'm glad that I could do something cute that reminded me of why I love logic. The other day I walked into the math department's undergraduate study lounge, and someone had written "No logic in the math room please" with another person having added that "Set Theory doesn't count as math." For a while now my major has been the running joke in the department, but now I'm kind of over putting up with it.

I applied to Carnegie! (Also Tufts, UMich, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford.) I didn't know how amazing our philosophy department was until last yearish when I was researching schools and whatnot. I actually found math classes where you prove things were wayyyyy easier than the things before it, since I was put in the math track where they don't think you're really capable of being a mathematician. (They really prize their bright students in the honors program, and notsomuch the others... Though talking to the people who have to teach them, I guess there are a lot of very entitled students taking these courses and it makes them less sympathetic to students who really want to learn.) Accordingly, I sort of stumbled around the math department until I took a proofy linear algebra class and found it was something I was good at. (Proofs, specifically. Which is why I like logic.)

Be careful! A big mistake people make when walking on ice is that they try to go all graceful dancer, but you'd be better off mimicking how a penguin walks. If you sort of waddle, you won't fall over. You will probably look ridiculous. But less ridiculous than falling people, so I guess there's that.