S-STEM Scholar Anna Bright's Blog

What Dr. Nishimura likes best about being a professor is that he gets to control what he thinks about whereas most jobs a worker has a boss that tells them what to do and what to think about. He finds it enjoyable to talk to students and that working as an applied math professor has a self serving ego component in the sense that not everyone esteems mathematics to be highly useful or even a subject to easily converse with anyone, thus the workplace in which he is in mathematics is viewed as highly important and interesting. In return he finds this very rewarding.  What he finds the worst about being a professor is that he makes less money than most of the colleagues that left from being a professor and have gone to industry jobs. He also dislikes that even though he can see how his work has an impact on his students, there is an abstract view of his impact on society. He also dislikes how the job can at times become highly stressful because of research, and research that has to b

The thing that I found very surprising and very positive about transferring was learning that ASU offered research courses. These research courses can be used to work as a supplement instructional aid, for example, Complex Analysis is not offered at ASU West, but, as long as I can find a professor who knows Complex Analysis I could ask them if I could do a MAT 499 course with them with the topic of the class being complex analysis. Or the course can be used for research purposes, sometimes a student can have a really interesting research topic they would like to work on or the professor may have something that they would like to work on as well, and both the instructor and student come to an agreement as to what they would like to work on. Usually these courses are one on one, as a product this creates a good student-professor relationship. These connections are important as later on these professors that you have been working with can write you great letters of recommendation and have