Blogs

The busy life of a grad student is often spent juggling multiple responsibilities from school, work and personal life. If you’re anything like me, you’re always finding yourself overcommitted to things and something has to drop to the wayside. One of my goals has been to better manage my time and set up boundaries with my commitments. I’m not naturally a planner (big understatement!), but I’ve come to realize that if I’m not careful, things are just going to fall apart.

Academic conferences offer opportunities to test-run ideas before like-minded colleagues, to network, and to key into conversations within one’s discipline or specialization. For many academics, it’s an integral part of the job. In my University’s promotion system, considerable weight is given to presenting papers at academic conferences. Whether local, national or international, conferences provide venues for institutional promotion-- a chance to showcase research outputs from our little corner of the world.

Lately, I've had to become an expert at running projects outside of my expertise. I'm heading up a website project and a room A/V design projects, both subjects I know just enough about to be dangerous.

This Marketplace report brought me up short. It’s about Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, endorsing gay marriage in New York. The report notes that CEO’s of major banks aren’t generally known for taking positions on potentially divisive social issues.

There are many times in math that we encounter behavior that appears to repeat or cycle back on itself. For example, one often finds strings of repeating digits when trying to convert a rational number into a decimal, or one can observe cyclical behavior associated with the trigonometric functions. Such behavior came to mind recently as I realized that we are moving from winter into a spring that will eventually turn into summer, and that, as a mom, I needed to plan for such a change in seasons.

Sometimes I'm so stupid I could kick myself. Of course, before that kicking urge comes on, I have to realize my own stupidity -- have to, at least somewhat, realize my previous error. What triggered this personal epiphany (if that's the right word -- it wasn't a real "AHA!" moment, more like "ahhhh . . . . ummm . . . hunh?") was an advertising sign on the top of a taxi cab. The sign advertised a pizza place called "Paisano's", and my son asked me what the term "paisano" meant.

Fun trivia fact: this is a Presidential election year. But you wouldn’t know it from walking around campus.

Hats off to Kellogg! It’s rare to see a market leader remaking its up-to-this-point-wildly-successful business model, but this is exactly...