2020 Major: Mathematics and Economics; minor in English
"I took a rather roundabout path to the Math major at Duke. It wasn't until my sophomore year linear algebra course with Akos Nagy that I truly fell in love with the beauty of mathematics and appreciated it as more than the memorization and application of formulas. As someone who up to that point was more into the social sciences and the humanities, math presented an intriguing way of thinking to me: it forces one to justify everything one says from first principles, to consider the cogency and elegance of one's arguments. Professionally, math opened many doors for me as someone interested in applied social science. Pairing my math degree with a social science degree like economics enriched my experience in both majors, as I would learn an interesting application of a mathematical concept in my econometrics courses and then be able to turn around and learn about that concept more deeply in a mathematics course. Overall, I think studying math at Duke provided me with an invaluable experience in thinking through a wide array of analytical problems, as well as a lucrative and in-demand quantitative training for the job market."
"I have some advice for those who may be interested in the major but may not have the most rigorous mathematical background coming in. I feel that it is very easy to be intimidated by math courses at Duke; I certainly was when I first sat down in my multivariable calculus class next to some students who had already taken that course in high school. One of my biggest surprises as I started in the major was that math was a skill like any other, a skill that can be honed through hard work. It certainly took many late nights in the reading room on the second floor of the Physics building, and many hours spent asking silly questions in office hours, but it is possible to get to a stage where one feels confident approaching a new and unfamiliar mathematical topic, rather than intimidated. I also believe that the math major gets far better the further along you get. Some of the most interesting and enriching courses I took in college were math electives, though it took a lot of time and effort to get that far along in the major to be able to take those classes. I think that the math major enables one to have a lot of specialization; I for instance knew I was very interested in statistics and machine learning, and was able to take multiple cross-listed statistics courses as a part of my major. These courses, such as Higher Dimensional Data Analysis with Paul Bendich, have been invaluable to me even today in my career as a data scientist."
