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Lessons from My Math Degree That Have Nothing to Do with Math

Alex Korchinski
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Published in
7 min readMar 14, 2018

Photo by David Dai

Picture a mathematician. What do you see?

I’ll conjure up a popular image. It’s late at night. A figure is hunched over a desk scribbling into a notebook. The room smells like graphite dust, eraser shavings and body odor. Numbers and symbols gleam in the lamplight, and a calculator sits idle nearby towering textbooks.

It’s not an entirely unjust stereotype. Math attracts its fair share of cave dwellers. (I should know, since I had lecture with them.) So when people discover that I studied applied mathematics in college, I get why they might raise an eyebrow like I’m from a different species.

The truth is far less exotic: I chose to study math because I was good at it and thought quantitative skills would bolster my career prospects. As it turns out, I wasn’t very good at it. I got my ass kicked by Euler and eigenvalues alike. And although familiarity with statistics has proved marginally useful, I’ve never used 99 percent of the methods, proofs and theorems I painstakingly studied in my college courses.

There were so many moments that I wished I had picked a different major. Something easier. A little less painful. At times, I hated math. And yet, six years later, I’m…

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Published in Forge

A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Alex Korchinski
Alex Korchinski

Written by Alex Korchinski

I do personal experiments and make products for people with disabilities (Accessibility PM at Workday)

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