Reflections from Serein's meet and greet

When I was a PhD student, there used to be a concept called Wednesday Tea Time. One day a week, we would take a break from our insanely rigorous course/research work/qualifier prep-ridden 16-hour days to meet the whole department at 4PM. But the best part of tea time was that along with the ‘tea’ there would be department-sponsored 'cake'. Needless to say, for poor graduate students like us; this was a luxury! We would all come out of our basement offices and for an hour, enjoy the tea and cakes. And all our professors would also make their way down from their offices to try to get to the cakes before we finished them all.

The second best part of tea time was the conversations we would get to have with our professors. During this one hour they would transform from scary mathematicians into joking, caring, simple men (we had no female mathematician professors). Being academicians, conversations were typically explanations of complex problems we didn't quite grasp in a seminar or discussions about new research topics. Mostly, they were silly math jokes.

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Read the full post on Serein's blog.