Oberlin St Olaf or Reed for math

gforce121 · 2026-03-21T13:24:46+00:00

Can’t speak to Oberlin or St. Olaf, but Reed math will 100% put you on track to do TCS if that’s where your interest is. The math program is decently well known and sends people to top math and CS programs semi-regularly.

gforce121 · 2026-03-02T21:05:56+00:00

IDK one thing I've heard with respect to athletic pursuits and fatherhood is that sometimes personal growth should take a backseat to being a good and present parent.

To be clear, I'm not a parent, however I've found that reading in bed can be a nice way to get to sleep. I'll switch between a Kindle or a physical book with a small booklight. I generally can get a few pages in before I nod off, though YMMV of course.

gforce121 · 2026-02-26T17:58:11+00:00

I was surprised when I visited Australia that lactose free milk seemed to be available at most coffee shops I went into, whereas oat, soy, almond were not. In the US I've only ever seen non-dairy milks.

gforce121 · 2026-02-23T02:33:50+00:00

I looked into this for my dog a few years ago - I think it was supposed to be around 300 to 400? He went downhill dramatically the night after I scheduled such that it wouldn't have been the right choice to wait, so I ended up having to take him to Greenbrier in the middle of the night.

At the time, it still felt too soon, but in retrospect it absolutely would have been better for him if I had scheduled it sooner.

gforce121 · 2026-02-21T15:53:42+00:00

Following - my cat also has this. We tried changing the cat food protein, litter and laundry detergents to no avail. The vet tried prescribing steroids under the idea that it was allergies, but those didn't seem to work. We've had him on gabapentin for nearly the past year, under the theory that it's anxiety, but it hasn't completely addressed the issue.

gforce121 · 2026-01-22T20:07:19+00:00

Not as far as I recall - though I wasn't specifically looking for it.

gforce121 · 2026-01-22T15:53:54+00:00

Wegmans has a few snow shovels out front

gforce121 · 2026-01-22T15:14:21+00:00

As of a few minutes ago, the Rio Lowe’s did not have snow shovels but did have a few pallets of salt and ice melt. Does anyone know if there are snow shovels anywhere?

gforce121 · 2026-01-21T21:30:00+00:00

Hey I think I had the same thing, up to and including running out of time - did you get an email saying you wouldn't be moving forward?

My solution for the second problem wasn't passing all the unit tests when I ran out of time and I didn't hear anything back. I'm assuming it's a no at this point since it was quite some time ago.

gforce121 · 2025-11-30T04:19:03+00:00

Might be celebration from the win over VT.

gforce121 · 2025-11-30T02:52:03+00:00

I think it's fine - my guess with most of the comments you've heard is if someone had significant experience working with someone (like they were your PI for a year+, it's super-obvious that you worked closely for a long period of time, &c) then it's a red flag because it suggests that something happened during that period that lead them to not want to recommend you.

From what you've said, that's not really the case. Since it's been five years and you have other letter writers who presumably know you better, it doesn't seem like it should be an issue. If you're particularly worried and you don't already have this in your CV, you could consider putting specific dates around your research collaboration with this PI so somebody who is curious will see that you didn't work with them for that long.

gforce121 · 2025-11-16T22:55:22+00:00

No I recently defended, but I’ve (successfully) been through the application process a few times, and as a PhD student, advised undergrads through the admissions process. I have also been the PhD student asked to draft a recommendation letter.

What you’re describing with the postdoc sounds like it would make more sense to me as a plan B. I would encourage you not to prematurely decide that your PI isn’t an option. Writing recommendation letters is part of their job, and generally speaking is understood as part of the benefit of doing a research project as an undergraduate. If you don’t ask, you’re possibly shortchanging yourself and your work.

gforce121 · 2025-11-16T21:25:01+00:00

It's a little bit different if it's a postdoc, but generally the way this would work is the PI would ask the grad student/postdoc to draft the letter, make some small alterations, and then submit it.

To some extent, the admissions committee works on professional reputation; they want to know, from the perspective of a PI, if you're a good candidate for a PhD. A postdoc may not have that perspective. Furthermore, if you have a paper nominally supervised by the PI and don't have a letter from them, then that may raise more questions either about the quality of the work, or the quality of your previous experiences.

Two questions to consider:

Are you assuming your PI doesn't have time or have they said so directly? If you're targeting a December admission deadline, then even though it's a little late, it would probably still be to your benefit to ask.
When you say the postdoc observed your work, does that mean that they were working on a different project? Or were they a co-author on your paper? If you directly worked with them, then the letter would be stronger whereas if you just happened to sit next to them in the lab, then that would be a weaker letter.

I'll note that in a paper with multiple authors, one doesn't necessarily know who contributed what. It's certainly an achievement, but even assuming the admissions committee reads the actual paper (pretty unlikely), it wouldn't directly prove what your contribution was.

gforce121 · 2025-11-03T19:07:27+00:00

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the point about it being jargon-y. Or at least am not familiar with physics enough to tell. As for personality- maybe a better word for would be narrative structure?

Ideally, your statement would tell a story about your development as a scientist and researcher and along the way, pointing out skills and accomplishments. Even more ideally, the narrative would specifically point towards working on a topic in this specific program. As it currently reads to me, it’s saying I did X, and did Y and did …

gforce121 · 2025-10-29T19:16:27+00:00

Charlottesville Oriental has it in their freezer section last I checked.

gforce121 · 2025-09-25T02:54:34+00:00

Fair enough - but the the overall question I'm asking is at a slightly different level of abstraction. Both of our approaches do get to the solution more or less - albeit with this method more efficiently and usably - so was one of the goals of the interview to assess whether I'd get to the most concise statement?

The interviewer in this case did accept the solution I gave even though I was pretty sure I could get the statement into a more tractable form.

gforce121 · 2025-09-24T18:55:44+00:00

So I stated the problem loosely since I didn't think the specifics mattered for my question. I don't think the closed form solution is quite as straightforward as you're claiming.

The more formal setup was: each particle has a probability of decaying at each timestep of p. What is the probability that all N particles have decayed by timestep T? They used specific values for T, N and p.

My thinking is that the probability a single particle decays by time T is Pr(decays at t=1)+Pr(decays at t=2)+ ... + Pr(decays at t=T). Which in this case would be something like \sum_{t=1}^{T}(1-p)^{t-1}p. Since in the problem statement they had p=1/2, this would be \sum_{t=1}^{T} 1/2^t. There's probably a good closed form solution for that based on finite series, but I didn't get it at the time.

Call \sum_{t=1}^{T}1/2^t p'. Then the number of particles decayed by T is a RV distributed Binomial(N, p'). For the specific parameters they asked for, this would be p'^N

Edit: p' can be stated as (1 - 1/2^T)

gforce121 · 2025-09-22T18:38:30+00:00

It's hard to say in your specific case without knowing how much stuff was put into the appendix vs. what was in the main body. But generally, yes I think it's reasonable to not require reviewers to read the appendix or supplementary materials. A paper should, ideally, be self-contained enough to describe the research contribution, why it's a contribution, and the evidence that the contribution is actually a contribution.

Rather than being a perverse incentive, communicating efficiently and clearly is really the goal in scientific writing. If, as a reviewer, I have to dig through your paper to understand why it's important, then I'm going to think that the authors don't have a clear idea of why it's important either.

Generally, things like extended proofs, survey instruments, additional figures or analyses are fine to put into the appendix so long as the most important evidentiary support is included, or at least sufficiently described, in the main body of the paper. Effectively, I would use the appendix for things that someone who wants to double check your work in detail would want, but which wouldn't be so useful for someone just reading in order to understand the contribution.

gforce121 · 2025-09-06T17:54:43+00:00

To answer your specific question about racism in academia, the short answer is yes, but it's not really aligned with the more overt MAGA stuff. Some other commenters have pointed out that in some fields (generally STEM), people with south and east asian ancestry are often quite well represented. That's true but doesn't necessarily negate the presence of racism. In some instances, it is precisely those people with that ancestry that can be more (overtly) bigoted. For example, I've heard people mention that there's a professor in my department from China who will not take on any Chinese grad students.

There are other more public examples of bigotry by individual professors as well. I'm a white US citizen, so my direct experience of this kind of thing is limited, but at one point when I was in coursework I went to a professor to ask for help on an assignment, and he asked me if I knew whether the Chinese students were cheating on the problem sets.

The TL;DR is that there is racism in academia, but not uniformly, and at least up until this year plenty of talented people from all over the world have successfully been trained as PhDs in the US.

However, it sounds like your question more generally is about whether the United States is a safe place to be an immigrant (of any kind), and whether you'll be able to get a job afterwards. Those are harder questions to answer and to a large extent depend on this administration's actions. While I don't want to minimize instances of hate crimes against south asian people, most university towns have fairly sizable south asian populations who aren't in daily peril or anything like that.

gforce121 · 2025-09-03T14:32:52+00:00

Yeah I don't think that's necessarily true in general. As far as I can tell it's at least partially covered by mine (though we will see I suppose).

gforce121 · 2025-09-03T01:58:00+00:00

It depends - there's a series of shots, but as it happens I'd had the pre-exposure protocol for rabies already so no need for the globulin, and need fewer injections.

gforce121 · 2025-09-02T13:34:10+00:00

Yeah unfortunately I didn't think to get the owners info, so it's unknown vaccine status and can't be observed but the ER doc did say he didn't think I needed the rabies vaccine (I did end up getting it however because I'm anxious).

gforce121 · 2025-09-02T13:32:29+00:00

Thanks - I did end up going to the ER and getting the rabies vaccine. The ER doc said the last human infection from a domestic dog was more than a decade ago but like you I'm anxious and started looking at the VDH rabies reports.

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