Current Situation

I last studied math three years ago, in grade eleven. In what may have been an overly ambitious move I took the highest level of math offered for my grade (pre-university functions and relations). It ended poorly, somewhere in the mid-sixties. To be fair, I did reasonably well throughout the semester but everything went to shit during the final exam, which I had to do days after it was scheduled due to having been laid up with flu that manifested itself with projectile vomiting. Regardless of what factors influenced the outcome of the Last Class (I blame insufficient studying on top of a lack of in-depth comprehension*), it made me decide not to pursue any further mathematical instruction. When course selection time rolled around I'd pretty much decided to go into the humanities after high school and therefore didn't see much of a point in soldiering on, math-wise. So my current level of actual math knowledge is on the shabbier end of the grade eleven spectrum and worsening because of disuse.

Once I got to university, I rejoiced in my newfound freedom from all things resembling science (I needed something to fill up my last semester of high school so I took Earth and Planetary Science, which was a joke but claimed to be science) and promptly befriended a bunch of math and science people. This means that I have spent large amounts of the last few semesters in the math lounge. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am a fixture of SUMS (this is the clever acronym that stands for both the Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students and its lounge) but I spend enough time there that people who don't know me personally assume that I'm in whichever math-esque major they aren't in. CS (computer science) people think I'm in math and vice versa. These mistaken impressions, which never fail to amuse and delight me, are what gave me the idea of trying to cultivate them.

Hanging out with math people and in SUMS has allowed me to pick up some of the trappings of mathiness, like the names of the faculty's professors and certain key vocabulary terms. I've been putting more effort into being able to fake my way through computer science-related conversations than math ones but I think I'll start giving them equal attention. I'm also fairly dorky and have interests that go with the territory, which puts me in a good cultural position for this endeavour, I think. Like, I read a lot of webcomics, including xkcd despite the fact that I don't get most of the math and computer-related jokes.

*The time that my best friend and I were caught playing games on our TI-83s probably didn't help either.