I have been invited to Maryland for a face to face interview for a sweet job with a really really impressive conservation biologist at a totally awesome research facility. I have to put together a 45 minute (+/-) research presentation and present it to people at the research facility as part of the 1.5 day interview. It is kind of astonishing to me that I am being interviewed by this guy for a job to develop population and harvest optimization models...this is some heavy mathematical shit and if I get the job I'd be working for one of the worlds primer quantitative ecologists. The thing that is astonishing to me is that since first grade I have struggled mightily with mathematics. Stricken with dyslexia, simple arithmetic is actually quite hard for me...it still is. I always have Cate calculate and add the tip to our bill at restaurants. Last year at an awards banquet, where I received an award for being an "outstanding graduate student" Cate went to the restroom and I closed out our bar bill, on the way home she let me know that I added the $2.50 tip incorrectly to the total...whoops. I blamed it on the two glasses of wine, but I was perfectly fine to drive so you'd think that adding 2.5 to 13.65 would be no problem either. Yet here I am...a quantitative avian ecologist using matrix algebra with beta and log-normal generated random numbers to predict the probabilistic growth of wild animal populations. I should send a copy of my dissertation to my high school math teacher Dr. Wertis, who gave me a C in 10th grade and tried to have me removed from the honors track math curriculum because she thought I was a slacker or just stupid. I should also include a photo copy of my giant middle finger as appendix B just for her benefit.
Anyway, I am pretty excited about this Job interview.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Basic math is for suckers.
Yes, I too struggled with numbers and look at my great success.
Best of luck on the job interview... I hope things go well so I have an excuse to mail you a bottle of "The Bird Man" wine that I saw at Whole Foods, assuming it's legal to mail wine from my state to your state.
Hey dude - what's wrong with the tip you left. I think it was very generous! Good luck on the scary-view. I don't know that I'll make your run-through on Mon.
Post a Comment