daring, ambitious, supercilious
"Professor, I need to speak with you. Preferably in private."
"Let's find a quiet place."
Walking down the marble stairs, he jokes that he probably shouldn't speak with me until the whole situation with Russia subsides. Then he reminds me he actually knows I'm not Russian, and I breathe. We sit down on the front porch of a century-old building, and we speak. I shiver of cold, but sit there nonetheless, my advisor seems completely unaffected by it.
He tells me the story of his getting summa cum laude. As it turns out, one of his math professors locked three departments up in the room, and refused to leave that room until Bayer was given the honors.
He tells me about his Romanian friend who thought he would spend his life teaching grade school in some rural Romanian village. That friend ended up escaping to Germany and then the US, and now, well, now he is rich.
He tells me that he is sorry to hear about my experience with the proofs class and heartily confesses that he believes that my professor is plain lazy. He chastises him for trying to put me into conventionality, and me for thinking I might be wrong. He sounds annoyed at the fact that Woodbury is teaching Higher Math next semester as well.
"Your ancestors went through shit orders worse than this. They could crawl kilometers through the trenches and not even. You can get through this. Your ancestors."
Finally, he asks me if I think I were correct. I shrug my shoulders, and he asks me to give my best guess. I tell him, very strongly, that, given my prior experience, yes, absolutely. I make a remark that, well, I have been told to tone it down on arrogance, so what do I know. He laughs gently, and tells me that, if anything, it is part of his job to encourage arrogance, not the other way around. He laughs out loud, very happily, hearing that I was called an arrogant princess before. He closes the discussion of arrogance by an example of his arrogance on his yesterday's flight cross-con. My advisor Professor Bayer encourages me to play mind games with people.
He asks me for my work, looks at it, asks if he could borrow this. He finally confesses that he usually doesn't do this, but he feels the need to bring this matter to departmental chair. He explains that he is 58 and he had seen too many success stories like mine. He tries to hide his irritation, but it is fairly visible: he doesn't want original thought to be hindered by conventionality. He says that straight out, picking up my paper and asking that I send him my midterm.
It really does matter if I were correct in those proofs or not. But one of the more important things is that, for the first time in years and years, someone actually steps in to shield me from mediocrity, to protect me from abuse.
Someone cares.
"Let's find a quiet place."
Walking down the marble stairs, he jokes that he probably shouldn't speak with me until the whole situation with Russia subsides. Then he reminds me he actually knows I'm not Russian, and I breathe. We sit down on the front porch of a century-old building, and we speak. I shiver of cold, but sit there nonetheless, my advisor seems completely unaffected by it.
He tells me the story of his getting summa cum laude. As it turns out, one of his math professors locked three departments up in the room, and refused to leave that room until Bayer was given the honors.
He tells me about his Romanian friend who thought he would spend his life teaching grade school in some rural Romanian village. That friend ended up escaping to Germany and then the US, and now, well, now he is rich.
He tells me that he is sorry to hear about my experience with the proofs class and heartily confesses that he believes that my professor is plain lazy. He chastises him for trying to put me into conventionality, and me for thinking I might be wrong. He sounds annoyed at the fact that Woodbury is teaching Higher Math next semester as well.
"Your ancestors went through shit orders worse than this. They could crawl kilometers through the trenches and not even. You can get through this. Your ancestors."
Finally, he asks me if I think I were correct. I shrug my shoulders, and he asks me to give my best guess. I tell him, very strongly, that, given my prior experience, yes, absolutely. I make a remark that, well, I have been told to tone it down on arrogance, so what do I know. He laughs gently, and tells me that, if anything, it is part of his job to encourage arrogance, not the other way around. He laughs out loud, very happily, hearing that I was called an arrogant princess before. He closes the discussion of arrogance by an example of his arrogance on his yesterday's flight cross-con. My advisor Professor Bayer encourages me to play mind games with people.
He asks me for my work, looks at it, asks if he could borrow this. He finally confesses that he usually doesn't do this, but he feels the need to bring this matter to departmental chair. He explains that he is 58 and he had seen too many success stories like mine. He tries to hide his irritation, but it is fairly visible: he doesn't want original thought to be hindered by conventionality. He says that straight out, picking up my paper and asking that I send him my midterm.
It really does matter if I were correct in those proofs or not. But one of the more important things is that, for the first time in years and years, someone actually steps in to shield me from mediocrity, to protect me from abuse.
Someone cares.