My time at Stevens is quickly drawing to an end. Like any graduating university could tell you, my time was incredible and I’ve made lifelong friends and it’s an experience I’ll never forget and all that stuff. But to dwell on that would be trite and a hack move. Rather, I want to discuss my rather odd progression through my educational landmarks.
I’ve always been at a weird place at this university — ever since my acceptance. During Accepted Students Day, my name tag proudly declared that my major was Mathematical Sciences. I know not when, but somewhere down the line in my studies, my transcript displayed that my major was in fact Pure and Applied Mathematics. While this is quite a trivial matter, it underscores the oddities that plagued me throughout my academic journey.
As I distinctly recall, on a car trip to Maine, I was informed in my acceptance letter that I was admitted into the 4+1 program. I still don’t know what qualifications I possessed to be part of such a program, nor do I really even know what it’s supposed to be, despite being so close to obtaining my master’s degree. I believe the idea is to take masters classes in your four years as an undergraduate so you can finish your master’s in a year.
But here’s the thing — due to a combination of having an exorbitant amount AP credit and the math curriculum being downright minuscule, I managed to finish all of my undergraduate requirements in three years. So now I’m in the 3+1 Program, I guess? No one has really ever officially acknowledged it, but hey, I got into grad school. My acceptance was quite unceremonious. I had received multiple emails pushing me to apply to Stevens’ graduate program through the online application portal, which was confusing because I would have figured they would have some system in place to just accept any student in the 4+1 Program. So I obliged and started a profile and began filling in all the information Stevens already knew about me. Then one day, I received a phone call from a Stevens office worker that went along the lines of:
“Hey, you’re applying to graduate school, correct?”
“Yeah…”
“And what program would that be?”
“Math…”
“Alright, you’re all set.”
“Uh, thank you?”
For a while, I wasn’t sure if I was a graduate student or not. Apparently, neither did Stevens, because for the first few weeks of my graduate program, I was not only registered as the wrong major, but enrolled in the entirely wrong school. I was a part of the Schaefer School of Engineering & Science (SES) every second of my undergrad, but for some reason I was thrown into the School of Systems & Enterprises as an Applied Math major. Not only that, I needed to get permission to transfer into the program I was originally supposed to be registered for. And due to starting out in the wrong program, I never really found who my advisor was supposed to be in SES. So I just kept going to my undergrad advisor and that seems to have worked so far.
And now another chapter of my education at this institution closes in an expectedly odd way with me taking one elective class over the summer in order to get the 3 credits preventing me from obtaining another admittedly very high quality sheet of paper with my name on it. Maybe this time they’ll also list my major because my undergrad diploma does not have the word “math” printed anywhere on it.
All this to say, I have no qualms over my unique trek through the administrative side of being a math major. Just that it’s been a very weird experience. Now I just hope they don’t accidentally shred my application for candidacy or something.
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