Statistically Significant

Another week in the life of Hoxie.

A lot of people were talking about the weather being bipolar this week, but it seemed pretty consistently cold and miserable to me. It was good practice for the “biking in the cold/rain/snow” experience that awaits me, though; now I know what I need to buy to get ready. I picked up a fender yesterday to counter the spray coming off the streets, but much more important to Hoxie Happiness is going to be a good pair of biking pants. My current strategy is to wear shorts and bundle up on top, but this results in a sweaty upper body and frozen-solid shins. (I was hoping my body would take the average, but no luck so far.) Wearing a hat under my helmet seems to do a good job of providing warmth and protecting my upper ears from the wind, but I’m eyeing this for maximum facial protection and ninja appearance.

I had some fun this week, too. On Wednesday night, I rode over to the Sunset Grill in Allston for an unofficial incomplete Pine Crest Class of 2005 reunion. In attendance at various parts of the evening were myself, Joel Lewis, Sam Cohen, Christina Fernandez, Courtney White, Alex Bassett, Courtney Caliendo, and Sara Lanes. It was great to see everyone and find out how close people are to me: Christina works next door at the Broad Institute and Sara is right down the street at Harvard Law, for example. I’m looking forward to seeing these guys again sometime soon.

I also decided to get back into the salsa swing of things this week, so I attended the Intermediate BU Lesson yesterday. It was intense! In the good old days, we’d do a nice 20-minute warmup of basic steps, side steps, basic turns, etc. Then we’d learn a little partnered routine and practice that for a few minutes before going on our merry way. Now that BU has an official competition team and beginner lessons dedicated to the easy stuff, though, we hit the ground running with a complicated individual pattern and music no slower than 120 bpm. I was in the back row and couldn’t really see what the instructor was doing, plus it had been more than a month since my last salsa experience, so I was struggling. (At one point, I was the only person in the room facing right while everyone else faced left. Oops.) Twenty minutes into the lesson, just as I was starting to lose faith, I was saved by the bell: the fire alarm went off!

After evacuating the building, we reconvened and jumped into the partnered routine, also complicated but more doable. I was learning the routine with two girls, Christine and Dina, who were both equally talented and forgiving of my rustiness, and it was looking pretty decent by the end of the hour. Putting the individual footwork and the partnered routine together was really neat, as they’re usually presented as unrelated entities. At the end of the lesson, I got recruited for the BU competition team, but as a graduate, I don’t think I’m allowed to compete. Still, I’m looking forward to the lessons on Saturday afternoons and will definitely be attending again.

With the Mathematics GRE behind me, I can now focus my energy on getting graduate school apps ready to go. A few personal statements are in “edited draft” mode, so I’m going to send them out to some friends for feedback. Other schools need some more work, but that’s what the next month is for!

On May 17, 2009, I graduated from Boston University. (Please see my biography for more details on my education.) The Mathematics Department ceremony was at 9 AM that morning, and the university-wide commencement exercises were held at 1 PM that afternoon. While these were obviously exciting events for everyone involved, I was extra-excited about the department ceremony because I would be giving the student speech! (While my father and brother knew about this, my mother and grandmother didn’t.  You should have seen the looks on their faces when I entered with the professors and sat down onstage!)

Professor Hall approached me about a month before the ceremony and asked me to give a “short, happy” speech. As long as it was brief and upbeat, I could talk about anything I chose to. Free reign for presentations is a great thing, but it also meant that I needed to put some thought into an appropriate topic. Friends of mine suggested that I “let epsilon be greater than 0″ and somehow prove that we’d all be happy, successful people in five years. Since most of the members of the audience would probably be of the non-math variety, though, I tried to find a more universal topic that would appeal to everyone. (Besides, that proof sounds non-trivial at best.)

Seeking inspiration, I turned to my list of books I’ve read recently and came upon Not Quite What I Was Planning. This book is a collection of six-word memoirs written by a few celebrities but mostly by ordinary people and submitted online to SMITH Magazine. When I read this book in April, I was blown away by the amount of emotion people managed to pack into their six words. Flipping through page after page of smart, funny, witty, regretful, or deep memoirs forced me to think about my own life, both thus far and in the future, and at six words each, the “brevity” aspect of my speech was under control. I thought that I could draw an appropriate amount of interesting, funny, and insightful material from this theme, so I wrote and memorized a speech that included a few of my favorite memoirs, a couple of my own creations, and some encouraging words on setting and achieving goals in the future.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how the speech would be received. I didn’t share the text with any of my friends or family, and because my parents were in town all weekend, I didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse during the few days leading up to the speech. However, I really enjoy public speaking and thought the text turned out well, so I was optimistic going into it. After Professor D’Agostino’s opening remarks and introduction, up I went to the podium, where I delivered what I thought was a very good rendition of the speech. The audience seemed to enjoy it, too; one of my own six word memoirs was “Math graduation speaker receives standing ovation” and they actually gave me a standing ovation when I finished! The rest of the ceremony flew by in a blur, and by 11 AM, I was holding my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics and the College Prize for Excellence in Statistics. What a thrill!

I was ready to declare victory with the speech, but less than 36 hours later, I received a Facebook message from Rachel Fershleiser, one of the co-authors of Not Quite What I Was Planning. She heard via a Google Alert and this blog post that I had given a speech referencing her book, and she wanted to learn more about the speech. We exchanged messages and I sent her a copy of the text, which she seemed to really enjoy. As of now, she’d like to publish the speech, and it will be interesting to see how this turns out!