Overview 

“What you are doing now will alter your conditional probability.”  --- Richard Li

 

My probability instructor once used this to encourage us to work hard for any math courses, because we never knew, what types of opportunities it will bring for those accumulated hard-work. Math courses here at UW were valuable to me not only because the friendship I gained, but also it shaped my long term career goals. I aim to become a quantitative financial analysis, and math courses are the cornerstone to those advanced level graduate courses.

 

Personal Importance of Task or Work

I have enjoyed all the math courses that I took in UW, because they shape my critical thinking mindset and persistent passion towards learning. I know that those courses are a good fit for me because I am excited to go to class every morning, and I want to talk about them with all my friends at night. I am passionate studying new concepts, theorems, and theories.

 

I met plenty of like-minded classmates, for instance, I had my first American friend in the real analysis class, and we discussed difficult problems together. This year, we celebrated Chinese New Year in the Odegaard 102, studying for an Riemann integration problem. Math problems have taught me the way to tackle any elusive question: how to break it down, transform it into something similar or study it case by case. I have never given up on any hard problems, I dare to ask questions in class and I have never missed any office hour that my professors ever offered.

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Tasks Accomplished

Here are the list of Math courses that I have taken and I loved all of them very much:

MATH 126 Calculus III

MATH 307 Differential Equation

MATH 308 Linear Algebra

MATH 309 Linear Analysis

MATH 324 Multivariate Calculus

MATH 300 Mathematical Reasoning

MATH 327 Real Analysis I

MATH 328 Real Analysis II

MATH 394 Probability I

MATH 395 Probability II

MATH 461 Combinatorics I

MATH 462 Combinatorics II

 

Courses that I will take in the future quarters, Spring and Fall 2018:

MATH 396 Probability III

MATH 399 Washington Experimental Mathematical Lab (WXML)

CSE 160 Data Programming 

MATH 491 Stochastic Process I 

MATH 498 Stochastic Process II 

MATH 464 Numerical Analysis 

MATH 407 Linear Optimization 

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Leadership Competencies Gained

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Self Understanding

Prior to taking any math courses, I was planning to go for a Business major and focus on accounting, because both of my parents are accountants, they wanted me to earn a CPA and secure a stable job. However, I did not get into Foster School of Business after two attempts. Luckily, I met a math-major friend on the new student orientation, who eventually became my peer mentor. He encouraged me to take a few math courses and see if I liked them. After trying out two quarters of computational math courses, I found out I was good at it and I enjoyed problem-solving. This curriculum experience has enhanced my understanding of my capacity in mathematics and my interests of going into the quantitative field.

 

Research

It is never enough to just know about the lecture material. I am always eager to do additional research to topics that I learnt in class. When I was taking MATH 462, combinatorics II, I browsed around various of exercises or illustrations that were relevant to concepts in graph theory, such as perfect matching, chromatic numbers, Ramsey theory. I found it interesting to study the same concept from different perspective, that is why math is so amazing. It is like an unbounded forest, with clusters of fields, algebra, analysis, combinatorics and more. There are also plenty of trees, leaves, and branches consisting of theorems, which were all built on each other, one leads to another. Working on math problems has helped develop my research skills as I need to navigate useful information effectively.

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Reflection and Application

Studying math requires consistent reflections. I reflect daily, thinking about what I could have done for this problem, is there an alternative way to prove it? Do I find the most efficient method to solve it? If not, then I reach out for help from teaching assistants and my peers. In one of my real analysis class, my classmates and I worked on a long problem for two weeks, kept revising the proof and adjusting the approaches, and we finally came out with a neat solution that we were proud of.

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Analysis

Analysis skills are essential when doing math problems. I obtained my unique study strategies for approaching a problem. Firstly, I write down what I know, including all the assumptions that provided from the question, and every theorem learned in this chapter. Secondly, I will also start from the conclusion, what do we need to prove and what it suffices to show. After these two steps, I will work on the interior connections, how far we are between what we know and what we need to show. Therefore, it is clear about what direction we shall go and what we want to achieve for an analytical problem.

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Idea generation

I like doing math as a group, that is how I generate various ideas and methods for one problem. Not only we can “think outside of our own boxes”, but also it is a vital way to maintain friendship. We studied together after we each thought through problems individually, then we discussed about that. Last Friday, our math study group proofread each other’s homework, and in this way, we will have a more comprehensive understanding of the concepts as a whole, and we can recognize the interrelationships between parts of the theory.

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Lessons Learned and Future Oriented Statement

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Since my math courses, I feel more confident to pursue career in the computational finance field. Inspired to take action, I have submitted four graduate school applications in February, and at the same time I am still looking for any type of related internships or entry level jobs in the Greater Seattle area. Over time, my interest in mathematics has made me a competent and persistent student, with strong foundation in analysis and research skills.

The most interesting thing I have learned throughout my mathematical education is hard-work. It takes time and efforts to comprehend a concept and work out associated practice problems. For any class I take, I need to make sure that I can feel comfortable about all the materials. Especially in Combinatorics, I found it quite important and interesting as I first saw that graph theory is connected with matrix, this is very mind-blowing!