A graduating senior reflects on past inspiration

As I got ready to begin this final article, I was at a loss as to where to start. What profound words or lasting legacy could I leave with my readers?

I decided to look back to my first article for inspiration, which inevitably led me to reflect on my entire Saint Joseph’s University journey, considering where I was when I began and where I am today.  (With less than a month to go, every last ‘this’ and final ‘that’ has me contemplating the past four years.)

When I arrived on Hawk Hill, I was a little shy but determined to make the most of my next chapter, and in that regard, I suppose not much has changed. However, other things have changed quite a bit.  Four years ago, I was just a kid who thought I liked math, and my perceptions of a computer scientist would have borne a striking resemblance to Jesse Eisenberg in the film “The Social Network.”  Since then, I’ve gone from the wide-eyed student who wanted to cry after the first day of Calculus II, to a mathematician with a solid mathematical intuition and confidence in my abilities. I think if I were to watch “The Social Network” today I would be frankly offended by the misconceptions and stereotypes it promotes about computer science.

My first column marked approximately the chronological halfway point in this journey.  At the time, I was frustrated by the bias a large portion of the general public seemed to have against math.  However, as I continued to write I began to cast a wider net looking for topics—there’s only so many ways to write, ‘Math is not that bad, and maybe it could even be fun if you gave it a chance. I decided to tackle some of the prejudices found within my fields, particularly those faced by women.

For instance, why did people always assume I wanted to be a teacher, but also assume the male math majors would do something like engineering? When I’d exhausted myself on gender biases, and perhaps inevitably, because we’re at St. Joe’s, I landed on the world’s broader injustices, although written through a mathematical lens or from a science perspective of course.  In some way, this transition from concern with the more minor, personally relevant, problems to an awareness of a wider, more encompassing point of view reflects the personal growth I’ve experienced in the last four years.

So, to return to my earlier question, perhaps the legacy of this column isn’t all about math after all. I would certainly be happy to know that I’ve inspired even just one person to have a slightly less unfavorable view of mathematics, but it’s become about much more. I came to Hawk Hill from a small town with a lot of homogenous people with homogenous ideas about the world. While I had worked hard to see beyond the narrow confines, books, vacations and imagination can only take one so far. However, at St. Joe’s and in the surrounding community of Philadelphia, I have had opportunities to meet new and different people, to take courses that tested not only my GPA but my values and perceptions, to travel within our own country and to several others and maybe most importantly to identify biases of my own. 

Therefore, dear readers, if I can leave you with anything, I’ll say don’t be afraid to try things that are difficult, seek out all the opportunities you can to learn something, meet someone, go somewhere new, check your personal prejudices, whether it’s a negative perception of math or something much more serious. Finally, to those of you with more than a month left at St. Joe’s, make the most of every minute, because like the Hawk, time flies.