Luca Anderlini is our professor for Micro. He’s the new Director of Graduate Studies too, so my performance in Micro serves the dual role of not failing out of the program and not embarrassing myself in front of the guy running things. I had seen him present a paper last semester, and this gave me high hopes. He had a sense of humor, an entertaining manner of lecturing, and a way of making the topics at hand seem relevant.

Let me cut to the chase: my hopes were realized. The lecture was interesting, but most important, something crucial happened, something I have been waiting my entire time at Georgetown to hear someone admit. Before Professor Anderlini got into the meat of the lecture, he made a caveat. He expressed to us, in no uncertain terms, that math is not the point of what we’re doing. While, he explained, he enjoys math a great deal, and even considered a career in math, he stressed that math is a just a tool to clarify our thinking. Anyone can reason, he argued, and make a convincing case. The key is that math is a rigorous formal language to express our ideas,  so that we can make sure we are not just deluding ourselves with words. Again, math is not the end, it is only the means.

That was the breath of fresh air I needed.

I posit that, for whatever reason, not liking a class and not doing well in a class are correlated. For students who are sufficiently intelligent, and thus not close to failing any one of their classes, this doesn’t matter. They can spend the most time on the classes they like most. Those are good times.

But if you are up against the failure constraint, you will tend to be spending less time on the classes you like and more time on the classes you need to make sure you pass. It is all the worse if the classes you are doing poorly at are also those you do not enjoy very much. (This is probably the case: see above). Those are not very good times.

Here’s hoping my constrained optimization problem has a feasible solution.