Insert Bad Pi Day Joke here

Nope, I am not going to talk about PI Day

• Oh wait, I just did! Oh well. Spring break was less restful than I thought it would be.
• I ended up doing 2 talks (one on isogenies and another on blockchain), a panel (on grad school, research, life advice), and a podcast (to be released on April Fool’s Day). I remember sending people bios and headshots in succession and taking mini-naps. I also spoke to two students; one who is going to a Master’s Programme, and the other who is a freshman and considering grad school (both are amazingly motivated and I’m excited to see what’s next for them!). I’ve found that persons who tend to take the time (and have the courage) to reach out tend to become these superstars (even if I am just privileged to meet them early on), which might be a result of their initiative, diligence and commitment. It’s inspiring so whenever I have the time, I’m always happy to chat.
• I think by Wednesday I was so exhausted I actually took a day off! Yeah…during Spring break, if you can believe that one.
• I was also gifted the sickest mic! Being an audiophile, I immediately thought it looked like the SM58, which is a mic commonly used; it’s like the Varicam of microphones (if one had to equate it to a work-horse camera).
• I also bid on papers for a workshop, attended a conference virtually, and read a bunch of research papers, got into a Fellowship and worked on a proposal.
• Hmm… that doesn’t sound like a “Break” at all I guess. I liked that I was able to do all of this on my own terms, and now I am trashed because I stayed up until 3am each morning and am trying to get back on a 7:30am schedule again. A girl can dream but so it’s painful right now. I tend to speak in shorter sentences and my sense of humour tends to have an extra dose of wit and dryness when I am lacking sleep. I’m sorry.

Things over Break

• My birthday was amazing. I ended up getting a massage, chatting with my parents, and attending the Number Theory course, until the TA kicked me out upon realizing it was indeed my birthday for our study group (Ha! You have been removed from this meeting. Go celebrate your birthday!).
• I attended a Number Theory talk on deRham / Hodge-Tate cohomology. So the speaker mentioned Deligne’s Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, Betti local systems, and used an example involving Siegel modular threefolds, etc.
• I read a lot of papers related to my research area in the wee hours of the morning, and even found some code to try out in Sage, but my advisor said it might be kind of not fully correct because there is some context missing from the author’s understanding, which is interesting and makes me value my taking the time to learn this rigorously even more.
• The group to which I was assigned for the Number Theory conference focused on unitary groups. Interestingly, the Number Theory talk I saw on DeRham cohomology (at the Number Theory talk) mentioned some of the things we learned, so I was able to understand a lot more than I expected! What the TA for our virtual study group did was excellent, which was to point to resources and structure an Overleaf document with a summary of what we should be studying, what problems we should focus on, and what the lectures spoke about. He also identified what the following lecture (for the upcoming day) would cover. So we started out learning about GL2 and L-functions on Automorphic groups, Hermitian pairings, the doubling method, how the Shimura variety is defined, and how we could look at the moduli problem using PEL data. What was also neat was that he pointed to other lectures or resources that were not necessarily from our group, which brought a sense of contextual breadth to the material. Everyone was super humble, too. We had a range of persons who were not familiar with the material at all, to those who could work through the problems with not much assistance. And so, everyone was able to get some form of satisfaction from the materials and lectures. Their setup was great, also. They had a large sharpie with a stack of papers, and the notes were being streamed while the lecturer spoke, and the video was immediately viewable after each lecture (in a folder of each lecturer’s name that was linked via the website), indexed by each day. We also had a Zulip chat for additional questions and resources.
• I found myself attending the lectures or working on my own work, and then either viewing the lectures in the evenings and attending the study groups.
• I also attended a group that covered the algorithm and had some materials for the PageRank Algorithm, which was kind of neat.
• I’m also working on a proposal that requires a fair amount of reading, and the work I’m doing requires going through some notation a few times, so I was able to get that going this week.
• Nope, I did not neglect yoga; don’t even think about it :). I almost slipped up on Friday, but my parents just got their blocks and sent me a photo and I decided you know what, I may not have blocks yet, but I can do yoga today.

Pics

• My internship sent me the softest frosted blanket. It’s hands down the classiest swag I’ve gotten so far, I think.
• I feel like I actually have to be a grown-up for this internship, apparently :)

I told you it looks like an SM58!

• It’s not, though. Sorry about that. I get to keep it because I’m doing another one in two weeks, too!
• I need to run to campus, I think, so I guess that’s pretty much all for now about my Spring Break week. I had a glass of Prosecco randomly, too, which I haven’t had (or any alcohol, to be honest, because it makes me sleepy and I need to stay up these days to get work done) in a while.

And that’s it