1) She will correct you (and your friends) when you use the word ‘probability’ lightly. Probability means something specific, people.

2) She will make you quiz her on the difference between the Cramer-Rao theorem and the Rao-Blackwell theorem. You will not care, because she doesn’t really care.

3) She will endlessly cite ‘this thing I read’ and then spend ten minutes with her smartphone trying to find it, because she doesn’t want to tell you the wrong sample size.

4) She is broke. (This has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with her being a grad student.)

5) She is cranky. (See parenthetical above.)

6) She will derail every conversation with ‘I wonder how likely that is’.

7) She will watch all of the episodes of Supernatural that are available on Netflix on an endless loop while she studies. (What, I told you I don’t hang out with other stats students. I have no reason to believe this isn’t true for everyone. (<= That is some TERRIBLE statistical inference that I just did there.))

She wants to graduate more than anything else in the world, including more than she wants to be nice.

Ok, fine. This is basically an apology to everyone for me sucking. And me being mean. And also me being boring. And watching all of Supernatural for the third time (Crockett, that one is for you specifically). I’m very sorry.

And then yesterday I went to this thingy… a conference thingy. And I met some very nice people who geniunely enjoy academia. I have had a good two years to become an academic, and I’ve totally failed. I mean, I haven’t failed my classes, but I have yet to embrace the lifestyle in any noticeable way. I presented my poster and then I left at the earliest possible moment. Which, now that I think of it, the academia-lovers did too…

I hate grad school. I do. I mean, I’m not sneaky about it. It’s hard, and I constantly feel judged (because people are judging me!) and I’m constantly working on things that contribute to absolutely nothing (hi, homework!), and I’m basically just over it. I graduate in six weeks, and I have been shouting it from the rooftops. (I should probably stop that before my advisor or someone hears me.)

I wonder if we chose the things that we become ‘a person’ for, or if they chose us. Could I have chosen to become an academic person?

I guess it’s too late now.

Career Day is nothing more than a career fair specifically geared at college students. A buttload of companies (don’t worry, I didn’t say buttload in front of anyone there) show up and set up booths and you talk to them and you hand them a resume and then… I don’t really know. Something happens. They sift through the three hundred resumes at the end of the night and set up interviews for some of them, I guess? I handed out 11, because the number of companies interested in a person with a masters degree in statistics is depressingly low, and I expect to hear from maybe four of them. I will immediately tell one of those calls that I’m not interested – it sounded fun at the time, but now I realize that it’s the quintessential Boulder software company, and I would hate everyone and everything about it inside six months.

It’s good to know yourself.

The most frustrating part of my day, though, went like this:

I wanted to talk to a company that does some sort of television… something. Honestly I don’t remember, because no one ever showed up at their booth and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whoever they were, their empty booth was next to the Navy booth. So I kept swinging by, and every time this dude at the Navy booth caught my eye and I nodded and just kept going…

And then, one time, he caught me. He saw my nametag, which had my name, major, and degree on it, and asked if I was interested in teaching.

I am interested in teaching, so I was like …. ok, what up, yo. He tells me about this instructor position that they have at a nuclear school in Charlotte, NC. (The school isn’t nuclear, they just teach nuclear stuff). Apparently they have a need for math instructors. He gave me the full sale – the benefits, the wages, the fact that you leave after four years with experience. And then he asked when I got my bachelors degree, and I told him, and then he asked how old I was.

I’m 31, I say.

He drags me to every other navy person there (and there were quite a few) asking if I could get a waiver for being 31. I was a little insulted, honestly. He never told me what was wrong with being 31, just that it was something that needed to be waived. Finally, someone tells him that yeah, it can probably be waived. Everyone else in the vicinity of the booth at that point was aware that I was probably the oldest person at the career fair, but hey – that can be waived.

That established, he looks down at my arm and asks if my tattoo is real.

No, I drew purple flowers on myself for Career Day.

Yes, it’s real.

Again with the waiver – except this time everyone needs to look at the size of my hand in comparison to the size of my tattoo.

This fellow was working very, very hard to recruit me, and I appreciated that.

I also left the booth feeling like an ancient painted lady.

I will not be joining the Navy.

Not daydreams of walking through Parisian streets – actual dreams in which I’m part of some group that has a trip planned.

In these dreams, I never even make it on the plane, much less all the way to Europe.

In last night’s version, I packed a bag but forgot pants, and then followed a GPS thing to the airport and ended up in Colorado Springs – more than 100 miles from DIA.

Sometimes I arrive at the airport and can’t find a place to park. Sometimes the airport is a maze.

Sometimes, I have an out of body experience where I watch everyone else milling around the gate, getting on the plane (which is always luxurious), and generally not caring where I am.

I can’t imagine what these dreams might mean.

Maybe I should just go to Paris.

My hands shook. My stomach hurt. Now that it’s over, I feel drained and a little nauseous.

Lest you think ‘proctoring’ is more complex than it really is, here’s what I did. I handed out tests. I told the class how to deal with a typo in the final problem. I answered individual questions, most of which were very straightforward. I collected the tests when the hour and a half was up.

Oh, I also announced when we had 45 minutes left, then fifteen minutes left, then 5 minutes left.

It’s not really a taxing job.

And yet – I was a wreck.

I so very badly wanted my students (I call them mine and I’ve lectured all of twice) to do well. I needed them to have learned something from me. I wanted the time I’d spent with them, during office hours or class or over email, to have cleared up any lingering questions that remained for them.

I really really wanted them to nail it.

When I had any reason to think that one of them was having a hard time – asking me a questions I couldn’t answer because it would be cheating, or staring really sadly at their paper – I wanted to help. I wanted to say “I’m so sorry that I didn’t, somehow, make sure that this was clear to you”.

Grading the tests just now was even worse. I kept thinking ‘damn it, I KNOW you know this – you answered it in class or on the homework or …’. I want to email certain students and say, look, I see exactly what you did here. I know why you thought this was the right answer, and here’s the part of the problem statement that you missed. Why don’t you take another look.

Of course I can’t do that.

Crockett says this makes me a good teacher – wanting success for all of my students. I think that it makes me a person who is not capable of becoming a teacher. I can’t feel this wrung out all the time.

Maybe it gets easier – but is that a good thing? Should you bleed for your students, or not?

(The moral here? Actual teachers (people who do this for a living and not just as an assistant for tuition) are under appreciated and underpaid. You know me – always saying things that everyone already knows.)

Let’s start with the complaint that’s going to make me sound like less of a intolerant craphead, ok?

Yesterday, after a loooong lecture and completely craptastic (and the word of the day is …. crap!) office hours, I walked the half mile back to my car.

I found a sticky note on my driver’s side window. It said ‘call me about your car 303-xxx-xxxx Alan’.

I WAS SO MAD, YOU GUYS.

Unnecessarily mad, really, but dude. What the hell. My first thought was that he’d hit me and was just really impolite about it. I walked around the car a couple of times and didn’t see anything, but seriously? My car is sort of trashed anyway. I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed a new ding.

My second thought was that he was mad that I was parked by the creek (in public parking) when I had a Mines permit sticker on my car. That’s just the only other thing I could think of that would cause someone to want to talk to me.

I didn’t want to deal with either of those things, but I called him and left a super pissed off message regarding the note. (That’s super pissed off in my mind – in reality I probably just sounded a little frustrated. I don’t do pissed off out loud very well.)

He called last night to tell me that he sells MOTHERFUCKING WINDSHIELDS.

Whatever. Douche. The note sounded like a command – and it was a sales pitch? Even if my windshield had literally shattered on the drive home, I wouldn’t have had him put in the new one. He clearly doesn’t understand… well, things. Like how to win over prospective customers.

The second person who did something weird and irritating (to me) yesterday was a generally nice fellow who’s in my Statistical Methods class. A class I’m taking, not teaching.

He came up to me and said ‘you have office hours, right?’ I said ‘… yes, for the undergrad prob stats kids.’ He said ‘I’m going to come by – you really helped me with my homework when we talked about it before class the other day’.

He didn’t ask if that would be all right, he just said it like a thing that was going to happen. It’s nice that our ten minute chat helped him, but I’m not his teacher. If he wants to work on homework together, I’d maybe try and find a time that wasn’t already set aside for another purpose. Instead, he wants to come in and supersede my undergrad kids with his graduate level not-my-problem issues.

Seriously, what? (Yes, this is probably not that irritating to anyone but me. Maybe it was the way he said it. Or maybe I’m ridiculous.)

Sometimes I just hate everyone.

Yesterday was one of those days.

So yeah, Google. Today I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted at the Boulder Google office, called Google.GetAJob(). It was specifically for female college students in tech.

I was sofaking excited, you have no idea. I’m going to Google! Whooo hoo! I’m going to get to see the inside of the offices and talk to people who work there and YAY. They’re going to love me and offer me an job and I’m going to get to play with them forever and ever!

Everything you’ve heard about the offices is true. (I signed an NDA but I don’t think the presence of kitchens in their offices was covered, so I’m going to risk it – plus, it’s nothing that hasn’t been said before). There really is food within 300 feet of you at all times. There really are massages available three days a week. There is a ‘decompression room’ with curtained off lounge chairs. In the Boulder office, at least, there is a bouldering wall and a Rock Band set up. There are bean bag chairs.

There is a teepee.

There are two cafes in addition to the micro kitchens found every 300 feet.

Some of it’s a little silly. For example, the dishes in the cafeteria have color coded labels – green, yellow, and red. Green means good for you, red bad. I find that cute but oddly invasive. If you only provide foods you feel good about serving to your employees, that’s a little much, but at least you’re sticking with your guns. This way feels sort of shaming, which I’m never a fan of. ‘Should you be eating that? Are you sure?’

I’m being a little judgey, I know. I think that’s because of the point I’m about to make that I’ve taken my dear sweet time getting around to:

I didn’t like it there.

There were three main reasons.

First, everyone I had the opportunity to talk to was self congratulatory to the extreme. You know that famous speech they give at Ivy League schools – look left, look right, only one of you is going to make it here? It was like that, except everyone was young and pretty and called themselves Googlers. Perhaps that was a function of the type of individuals who volunteer to spend their day escorting a bunch of college women around, though?

Second, there were very few women there. The Boulder office has about 200 people, and I saw rooms full of men everywhere we went – and every woman I saw was somehow involved in the event. There was a definite feeling that they’d all been dragged front and center just to show us that they exist. According to the always reliable internets, Google gets somewhere between 1300 and 6000 applications a day. With that many applicants, if you can’t diversify, you’re not trying. (The event was ostensibly a step in the right direction, but they weren’t actually recruiting us and one person actually told me that they find men do better with their interviews so they’re trying to help us interview like men. If your interview process isn’t bringing in the range of employees that you want, does it make more sense to change the process or to change the applicants? Oh wait, I know this one – THE PROCESS.)

Third and most importantly, the amenities felt like slight of hand. I can’t think of any better way to explain it.

• ‘So what kind of hours do the employees on this project put in?’ ‘Hey look, a teepee!’
• ‘What’s the plan for diversifying the workforce?’ ‘The air in the office is cleaner than the air outside!’
• ‘What kind of opportunities are there for working with the research group?’ ‘Let’s go look at the Flatirons from the private deck!’ (Yes, they were gorgeous. Obviously.)
• ‘What’s your favorite thing about working here?’ ‘Here, have a Google tee shirt!’

Oh, also a fourth thing:

I was given these two stickers simultaneously. (If you can’t see it, one is a sticker that says ‘I’m a woman in tech. That doesn’t mean everything has to be pink.’ The other is the Google name with the second o replaced by a female sign that’s pink.)

COME ON, GOOGLE.

I’m disappointed. I really wanted them to love me – it never even occurred to me that I wouldn’t love them. After I got home, I did some perusing, and I quite a bit of proof that Google is not for everyone. (No one on that thread explaining why they left mentioned the unfortunate male/female ratio – but it appears that no one on that thread is a woman, either.)

I feel like Google was my career Santa Claus, and I just found out it he’s actually a regular dude in a fake beard.

I hope no one ever offers to let me tour Whole Foods.

P.S. Just to head this off – yes, Google’s male/female engineer ratio is probably similar to other big technology companies. A) I don’t think that’s ideal anywhere, and B) IT’S GOOGLE. They set the bar higher all by themselves, it’s only fair for me to ask them to live up to that.

It was…. um….

It definitely happened.

I don’t actually have a great sense of how it went. I left about to cry – but I cry a lot lately, so that’s not a great barometer. Hey, is there air outside? Does that mean anything? No.

We have this thing that we use in class called inkSurvey. It’s actually part of what I’m writing research project on – all 40 of the students are given tablets for the duration of each lecture and there’s a web based program where they’re able to interact with us anonymously. It’s a whole big thing.

Via inkSurvey, one of them wrote ‘be our teacher for the rest of the semester!!’. That gave me the happys, you guys.

And then?

I fucked up two problems in a row, on the board.

I don’t know. My brother and Crockett have assured me that a teacher saying ‘I don’t know’ is not an unacceptable occurrence, especially if it’s followed by ‘I’ll look at it and get back to you’. Plus, as any anxiety ridden slightly obsessive graduate student would do, I double checked what I couldn’t remember and wrote up solutions and put them on the class site when I got home. And also emailed everyone. And also spent three hours this afternoon helping with homework via email.

Basically, I think I’m a good TA.

Just – I wanted everyone to leave that class thinking ‘damn, that was awesome!’. And it didn’t happen.

P.S. It’s Crockett’s mom’s birthday! Happy birthday, mama Crockett. You’re one seriously kickass lady.

His hair is super cool. I think he thinks so too because he sits up front in every class. By ‘up front’ I mean between me and the teacher. Every day. No matter where I sit.

“I have a feeling that I’ll get 7′s again!”

That’s not actually how it works.

Say you’re on a game show. You get to pick one door out of three. One door has money behind it, the other two have men with squirt guns.

You pick a door. The chance of you picking the door with the money is easy, right? It’s 1/3. Three doors, one guess.

The game show host decides to fuck with you. She says that one of the other doors definitely has a dude with a squirt gun, and asks him to come on out.

Then she asks you if you want to stick with your original choice, or if you want to switch to the other door.

You’re down to two doors now, right? One with money and one with a squirt gun dude. You’ve already selected one.

Do you switch?

Intuitively, I would say no. Why would you switch? You picked a door, stick with it, yo! Gut instinct and a desire not to get squirted won’t lead you wrong!

Mathematically, yes. You switch.

Why? Because you started with a 1/3 chance. That means that you had two chances to pick the wrong door. Even though you know, after the first squirt gun fella reveals himself, that you didn’t pick that wrong door, it’s still more likely that you chose wrong. If you switch, you end up with a 2/3 chance of winning. If you don’t, you’re stuck with your original 1/3 chance.

I hope that one day you’ll use this.

And then you’ll send me ten percent of your winnings.