Oh, the Person You Could Become

The university I attend for grad school has nearly ten times the number of students and feels exponentially less like the close-knit community that was FPU. I attend classes that often feel more competitive than collaborative, more robotic than creative, classes that are much more difficult and much larger than I am used to. Often, the people around me have taken more advanced math courses or have had experience with topics I have never even heard of before; I feel really dumb one day and extremely excited the next. It’s a frustrating dichotomy to reconcile, the fact that I am taking classes that are both so stressful and fast-paced that I want to cry in the bathroom for half an hour, but also expose me to some of the neatest new ideas discovered in the past half century!

My graduate school is an R1 institution nearly two centuries old, with an endowment that probably exceeds the cost of the Hubble Space telescope, which means they can afford to pay for every student to have subscriptions to fancy coding languages like Matlab and Mathematica, or shared access to the department’s $10,000 computers, or Microsoft Copilot. So you can probably understand why it might be a little stressful having never taken a class that used Matlab in undergrad but still being expected to code 100,000 different possible voting configurations for a made-up state and statistically analyze whether or not a certain configuration could be considered gerrymandering, all in a coding language that makes me want to throw my computer through a wall.

But even though I often feel a little behind in terms of technological skills and the knowledge of modern techniques, I like to think that FPU helped me become a more curious and hardworking person, as well as someone who really enjoys her subject. 

My undergraduate professors gave me a love for learning that I don’t think I would’ve gotten had I attended a larger institution or even if I had attended a university that wasn’t faith-based. I was taught things not just so I would be equipped for a job, but to—as Dr. Pam would say—make my mind a better place to live. My literature professors didn’t make me read all those books just so I could write good papers; I read so I could learn to be a more empathetic version of myself. My courses with Professor Ruesch were not just about learning theorems or how to implement numerical methods; those classes taught me how to problem-solve, be creative and value other people’s ideas. They taught me that it’s normal to fail sometimes. If large R1 institutions like my graduate school had a Dr. Seuss quote, I think it might say: “Oh, the things you could do!” whereas small, Christian, liberal arts colleges like Fresno Pacific might have one that would say: “Oh, the person you could become!”

A day in my life looks something like this: I walk to school every day in can’t-wear-my-hair-down windy weather, up four flights of stairs, and sit in a classroom where I understand maybe half of what the professor is lecturing, praying that my GoodNotes doesn’t crash while he is deriving some method of strained coordinates in handwriting I can’t read, on sliding blackboards teasing me with vertigo, only to turn around and walk back in possibly freezing temperatures to a shoebox room I rent where I solve homework problems until my Apple Pencil dies or I remember to eat. Some days it’s 8:00pm and I'm eating the same spaghetti I've made every day for the past two weeks in twenty minutes with Barq’s Red Creme Soda I bought more than two months ago that tastes like the tears of failure and diabetes.

But the hardest part is simply being away from home. There’s no one yelling at me to wake up in the morning, no one I can beg to scoop me ice cream after a long day, no one saying “Jasmine, Jasmine come look at this!” And although my place is less cluttered in Chicago than it’s ever been in Fresno, it’s a terribly empty kind of clean without my sister’s bookbag sprawled on the floor or that half-empty glass and candy wrapper on the end table proving that my brother was there. And there are no almond blossoms.

Sometimes it feels like grad school thinks of me as if I were a calculator and my whole purpose in being here is to hone my skills, to become the best calculator out there, doing calculus on the hardest equations, earning the highest grades in calculator-class, competing with other calculator-classmates. I calculate and code, code and calculate. If we lived in ComicWorld, I’m afraid my word bubbles would communicate using Python syntax, or worse: ones and zeros.

I will say, though, that my course content is really stinking cool! I am learning about branches of math that I never knew existed! I am learning why fans consistently have dust on them even after spinning, about time reversibility in the fluid dynamics of microswimmers, chaos and convergent cross mapping, and even about things that might seem super lame to the average person, like asymptotic and perturbation methods for limit cycles, but are actually way cool. The more I learn, the more depth I see in God’s creation. I don’t want to forget that what really matters is not my grades or how smart people think I am but that the supreme God of the universe loves me very much and pursues me every day. Some days it’s harder than others, but I am really trying to remember that and trust in Him.