The Most Surprising Positive Thing about Transferring

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 solid reasoning as to why you are a great candidate for grad school or for a job since they have worked 16 weeks with you. Not only that but these courses usually count for your degree completion. It's almost like a 3 in 1.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Advice For My First Semester at ASU

If I could go back to my first semester at ASU and give myself a piece of advice it would be to work less so I could make it to professor's office hours, and create a solid study group. During my first semester I had to work in order to try to be able to pay off some of my ASU tuition, along with other things. However this impeded me from going to my professor's office hours. I was tremendously struggling with the material in most of my classes. Had I gone to my professor's office hours this would have also helped me create a sense of community at West. However my days just looked like, I go to work, I get out of work, I go to class, and straight from class, go home. Over the next semesters I tried to take a lighter work load but it wasn't until I received the TRAIN scholarship that I was able to truly cut down how many hours I worked and actually focus on my classes. The unfortunate thing is by then, I was already burned out, and I was finishing up my senior year. Crea
Read more

Interview with Applied Math Instructor Dr. Joel Nishimura

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
Read more