Chalkboards and Community
There’s an undergraduate in the graduate algebra class who seems to be in a bit over his head. While the lectures don’t assume any previous knowledge of algebra, they move quickly if it’s your first time seeing the ideas—what an undergraduate course would cover in the span of 10-12 weeks we are doing in four. Late last week, he asked the professor a question and I could tell that he wasn’t quite satisfied with the answer. By habit I leaned forward to whisper something along the lines of “If you want, stop by the grad offices after class and I can explain” but I stopped myself. The grad offices the department gave us don’t lend themselves guest visits (but more on that later). At Cal Poly (where I did my masters) we always joked that we were packed into the grad offices like sardines but the offices at Wash U are practically overflowing.
When I met with my academic advisor prior to the start of the semester, I asked about the office situation. After chuckling he told me that first years are each given a carrel but assured me that the accommodations got better as you progressed through the program. A carrel is a little desk unit with a built-in shelf that you might find in a library. They’re perfectly functional as a desk but the steep walls are a collaborative point of friction. The office is an integral part of graduate school—it’s a place to study and rest between classes, to ask your peers for help, and to chat about anything and everything when the math gets a little too abstract and you need a break. While it may come as a surprise to those who are unfamiliar with the peculiar mannerisms of mathematicians, the center-point of any math office is not the desk, but the chalkboard.
Mathematicians have a bit of a complex when it comes to chalkboards. Maybe it’s for purely aesthetic reason, but a proper slate chalkboard is just better than a whiteboard. While everyone has their preference between the brands of chalk a department might stock, one manufacturer sits king: Hagoromo. Stick of Hagoromo are slightly wider than your average chalk (so it sits more comfortably in the hand) and it is coated in a thin layer of wax so that your fingers don’t get dusty. Not everyone uses Hagoromo regularly, but if there is a stick available, I don’t know a single mathematician who would turn it down. According to mathematical legend, no one has ever written a false theorem when holding a stick of Hagoromo. Young mathematicians watch university surplus sales to try and score a slate chalkboard at a hefty discount. The chalkboard is the hearth of the mathematical community—where students and professors gather to share ideas and prove new theorems.
I’m a sucker for tradition, so when I learned about this mathematical quirk during my senior year of undergrad I went out and bought a cheap chalkboard and a pack of Hagoromo. While I’ve never collaborated with anyone on this chalkboard, it still hangs a few feet to the left of my desk. When I first started writing on it, I knew that I was participating in a story that stretched back through generations of math students. It brought me joy to think about a potential future where I would work on problem sets in an office with my peers.
The Art of the Grad Office
The Dungeons of Building 38
I moved to San Luis Obispo in February 2021 and spent the first four months doing classes online. The pandemic was in full swing and I only stepped foot on campus a handful of times before in-person classes resumed in September. I spent most of that spring and summer in my apartment with the occasional trip back to Sacramento. When I started my second year I was confronted with two disparate truths: I really liked my peers but I knew that I was moving in less than a year. I’m too much of a romantic to pretend that I wasn’t going to make friends but that deadline loomed over SLO just like the golden hills.
I quickly fell into a rhythm in SLO, with the weeks marked by Taco Tuesdays, grading quizzes, and puzzling through Dr. Brussel’s pathological problem sets. Our offices were simple—roughly the square footage of a dorm room, four heavy duty 8’ tables topped with iMacs and ancient printers lined three of the walls with a chalkboard across the fourth. While four people shared each office, it was not uncommon for eight or ten to congregate in a single office. This overcrowding led to us nicknaming the offices “the dungeons.” In our office, we moved all the computers to one corner so that we could work on our laptops or spread out whatever books we were referencing for our classes or research—this had the added bonus of making room for an espresso machine, coffee grinder, and pour-over setup. Since our classes were down the hall from the offices, it was not uncommon to get to campus before sunrise and not emerge from the dungeons until after the sun had set.
As quarters passed, we grew close and learned how to make the best of life in the dungeons: Karl and I would drag each other into the sun for some much-needed vitamin-D, Taco Tuesdays went later and later as friends became family, we enrolled in a bowling class and spent two hours a week bowling poorly,1 I befriended a few students outside of the major and spend time not thinking about math. And yet, one thing never changed: after class we would congregate around a chalkboard in the “social” office and go over anything that confused us in the lecture.
The chalkboard in my office in Cal Poly was old and pitted, but it was clearly well loved. Over the 21-22 academic year we put over a hundred sticks worth of chalk on that board; some of it was Prang (the brand provided by the department) but most of it was Hagoromo. Sometimes a week would go by without facing a problem that was so difficult it required chalkboard work—when this happened the boards would collect doodles from some of the art students who were friends of the department. But then, when the problem sets were particularly pathological, we gathered around a chalkboard and worked through problems together. While it was the adventures off campus that made us family, we were always at home around a chalkboard.
The Carrels of Cupples I
Imagine my surprise, then, when I first walked into the basement of the Math Department at Wash U and saw the first-year offices. Over twenty carrels filled a room not much bigger than my office in SLO. Cold CFL’s in a colder, hanging industrial frame washed out the little bit of natural light coming from the tiny windows near the ceiling. I would come to find out that there was a bit of drama surrounding office placements. As you move through the program, you change offices. You are still confined to a carrel, but the square footage of the office itself increases. Perhaps most importantly, however, the offices move to higher floors and have larger windows. This year the previous fourth years didn’t move into the fifth year offices—meaning that none of the other years could move up. As result, the first and second years are all stuck in a single office. The department added more carrels in the middle of room so every student had their own desk, but the resulting office is a maze of desks, most of which sit empty because many of the other students (understandably) want to study elsewhere.
The first-year offices only has a single chalkboard; it’s three feet wide and sits on a wobbly wooden stand. Even when cleaned, it still looks a little dusty. On the chalk ledge sits half a stick of white Crayola (which writes a little worse than Prang) and a nub of sidewalk chalk.2 It’s a perfectly functional chalkboard, but it’s hard to love. Compared to Cal Poly (where the grad offices were built around the chalkboard) the board here feels like a bit of an afterthought.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that the department gave us offices—many graduate students don’t get an office until they pass their qualifying exams. Comparison may be the thief of joy, but I can’t help it. The labyrinthine spread of carrels feels more like a dungeon than anything in Cal Poly ever did. The chalkboard, the supposed “hearth” of the mathematical community is relegated to the only corner they couldn’t fit a desk. At the end of the day, it isn’t the kind of office you invite a curious undergraduate into so you can explain the nuances of the first isomorphism theorem.
The Trouble with Change
At this point in my life, I’m no stranger to moving to a new city. While I lived in the same house from birth to graduating high school, I just had my third “first week of college.” When you start undergrad, everything feels like a whirlwind; you’re on your own for the first time, no one is going to tell you when to go to bed or what to eat, and everyone around you is experiencing the same new-found freedom. Every September, the spirit of Bacchus descends upon college campuses and first-years everywhere are overtaken. Looking back on it, it feels almost otherworldly. I am an introvert to my core and yet I was attending event after event meeting new people left and right. It seemed like that was just what you did at the beginning of college.
The transition into my masters was different. Sure, COVID made in-person events complicated but even when transmission rates were down and restrictions loosened there was a decided lack of the bacchan revelries that marked the beginning of undergrad. Not only were we all in our early 20s, over half of my cohort were “4+1 students” who did their undergraduate studies at Cal Poly—meaning they were already close friends. When I started my masters, I didn’t feel like I had to rush to make friends. The relationships grew slower, but more organically. Even with a deadline on the horizon, classmates naturally became friends, and friends became family.
Now I’m here in Saint Louis making this transition a third time. While it’s going as I expected—slowly growing closer with my cohort, working on problem sets together and planning the occasion trip—I can’t help but compare Wash U to Cal Poly. The transition to my masters was so distinct from that to my undergrad that comparing the two didn’t feel appropriate. With Wash U, on the other hand, it feels almost identical. The people here are lovely. I can see many of them becoming life-long friends and collaborators. I can’t help but thinking, however, that I don’t want a new circle. The people I had in SLO were amazing; they were family. I know that making the comparison will only make the adjustment period longer but I can’t help it.
The fundamental problem here is bound in time. Strangers can’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) become close friends overnight. To become close with my new cohort I need to lean in—just as I did a year ago. Commit to the new friends and let time run its course.
When I sat down to write, I hoped I would discover something about the nature of change, to find the beginnings of an answer as to what it all means. On the other side of a few hundred words, I think it’s a question wrongly put. Trying to understand what change means is like trying to understand the ocean—maybe someone understands it, but I certainly don’t.
The only thing that I can do is be present. So I guess that’s what I will do. I will work on the problem sets with my classmates and hope that it’s not a fluke that generations of graduate students have become family following the same pattern. It may not be perfect, but that little, dusty-green chalkboard on the wobbly stand just might be the saving grace for that harshly lit basement office.
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