Today's video is going to be about my experiences during undergrad studying mathematics.
Now I did do a double major in physics and maths and I've already made a video called my regrets studying physics
so I thought it would only be fair to make this one. To start off
I'll tell you some things that I definitely don't regret about studying maths.
Number one would be that I don't regret the time that I spent studying
so I don't regret the time that I spent studying and learning mathematical ideas instead of
anything else that I could have been doing whether it's going out and partying or doing any other activity.
I don't regret that I spent a lot of that time studying.
I also don't regret any of the people that I've met whilst I've been pursuing maths
whether it was like lecturers or students in my class and my peers
I've really enjoyed some of the friendships I've made through math classes.
And in fact, some of my best friends have come from there.
So let's talk about some of the things that I do regret and this is actually pretty nuanced because I would say
overall, I'm glad I majored in mathematics. I think it's a good major and I definitely got a lot out of it
this is just inviting over Captain Hindsight to see a few things that I guess I
feel not the greatest about. So the first would be thinking that I was good at math
just because I've done a course on it or because I could get a good grade in that course.
I also had a lot of confusion between
getting a good grade on something and that meaning that I actually enjoyed it. What I mean is that I sort of felt like
sometimes more than I enjoyed maths
I just enjoyed the
satisfaction of getting a good grade on something or
the feeling that I could get from doing maths that had nothing to do with maths at all.
And that was more about my personal craving to do something that satisfied me and to get, you know, instant
satisfaction in a way that doing like a maths assignment,
especially the low-hanging fruit or the easy problems in math, can give you. You know, if you can apply some of these Ideas that you've learned,
do the homework problem, hand it in and get feedback pretty quickly afterwards,
it kind of feels good and it feels like you're accomplishing something.
It feels good to just to be able to finish something. That's what I'm especially talking about
these sort of low hanging fruit problems in math
they really gave me the sense of satisfaction and
I guess I enjoyed that. I enjoyed feeling like I was good at something and I think it was good for my self confidence
but I think I confused that feeling I got from math with actually enjoying it because
sometimes I didn't enjoy it at all but it was just masked by this feeling that oh, well, I got a good grade
so I must be really enjoying and I must be passionate about this subject when sometimes I wasn't. Don't get me wrong
there are some areas of math I really do enjoy
for example, I found my dynamical systems course really interesting
but then there were some courses that I took, I think for other reasons.
Maybe one of those other reasons was to stroke my own ego,
like I would take courses that I thought were notoriously difficult
just because I felt like I should take that challenge and that
people
taking those courses will seem to be the best at math and maybe it was the perception that I wanted other people to believe
I was good at maths as well.
So I feel like
maybe not all the choices I made in terms of which classes I picked and everything like that, where I put my effort, was
made based on what I actually enjoyed but it was based on other things.
It was based on what I thought I was good at from these
arbitrary grades and measures and it was based on what I thought was perceived as like the best math to be doing or the most
prestigious math to be doing when really none of those things mattered as much. So at the time
I wish I guess I'd been a little bit more aware of what I actually
enjoyed and what I didn't. My second regret is probably thinking that some of the math was more
abstract than it really was. I was presented with a lot of these really abstract ideas in math and
one thing about them is that they're very hard
I guess to show to people who are outside of mathematics completely, and have them understand what's going on.
So it kind of creates this feeling of like an elite little club of people who are in this math class, and they
understand something that kind of very few other people understand and it's kind of a big barrier to entry as well
sometimes when it comes to math.
So there were a lot of these abstract ideas and I guess I didn't ever really put much effort into trying to
communicate them to other people and I would often maybe brush them off as just being
crazily complex math ideas that you'd never understand unless you're in this class.
But it also affected my own thinking about these ideas
I guess sometimes I felt like certain exercises and problems that I was working on only
existed in this strange realm which consisted of the lecturer's own mind,
my notes and then on the exam and the problems didn't seem to exist anywhere outside of this. And
that affected the way that I thought about them.
I found them
not so interesting or important and I only
studied for them in a way that I was good at answering them on the exam but
didn't have much knowledge about these problems to apply
outside of that context. That lack of understanding of the bigger picture of some of these math ideas is
one of my regrets and actually I realized it from an unlikely source, and it was from a Vsauce video.
I think the video I remember it's called like
the brachistochrone and it's
actually about
finding the quickest way that you can fall between two points
but the fact is that vsauce made this really cool video about this idea and linking it to all these other physical
ideas
and it was really cool video and I was thinking, like I have actually done lots of problems before on the subject this
brachistochrone in math class and physics class and I never actually realized it was cool. I never thought about it as being
interesting in this context for other people and I kind of realized that a lot of the ideas
I've studied were actually interesting outside the context of the exam
But I've never been able to see that before. I've since seen a lot of other videos
someone like 3Blue1Brown presents math ideas, and I watch them and I think
Wow, this is actually interesting
these ideas are actually interesting, these ideas that I have learned about at uni but never cared about .
I wished that I'd seen a lot of these deeper meanings at the time and actually
used them to be more engaged with what I was learning.
Again, sure, I did appreciate some things. I mean I managed to get through the math degree
so I had some amount of inspiration behind me and what I'm doing now on YouTube
I think you can see that
I do have a passion for math somewhere down there, but it's definitely been very small at times and has come and gone. But I
really feel like it wasn't until after I finished a lot of these courses that I realized
these ideas were actually cool and that I probably should have spent more time
trying to understand how I could communicate them to other people because it would have helped me appreciate that they were cool.
So those are my thoughts here. It's just based on my personal experience
so let me know if you can relate to any of these ideas. And as always thanks for watching [Vsauce reference]