Finals Week

I took the final for my graduate mathematics class on Tuesday. I have to say that taking a class with a full time job requires some dedication (that I didn’t always have). There were times I had to ask myself why exactly I was doing all this. To compound the situation, this stuff doesn’t come back easy. Sure, I’m very comfortable with math but this was the math course to end all others. After just one semester our final included topics on ordinary differential equations, complex analysis, partial differential equations, fourier analysis, tensors and linear algebra. I’ve taken most of these subjects as entirely separate classes, so to take one course with all of them thrown together 5 years out of school was… intense. It was a challenge though and I love a good intellectual challenge. This is all in preparation for a graduate degree in physics that I could earn on a part time basis. I really think I should have been a scientist so this is a way to ease back into it without nuking my engineering career and being broke. It is interesting and challenging which is what I was looking for. There is one thing I’ve notice though, Physics is definitely different from traditional engineering. It is much more formal with its mathematics and uses a broader more exotic swath of it. I like it.