i was looking at my facebook page today, and i was surprised that it said that i had graduated from college seven years ago. the interesting part of this is that it's hard to discern any qualitative change in those seven years, which is definitively not true for most of my fellow alums. almost all of them have done something career-wise, or personal-wise, or both. i'm pretty much where i was seven years ago in terms of both of those things.

of course, the first holds only glibly. i have a ph.d. and am four years into a postdoc and within a year i'll most likely be a professor (hedge fund larks aside.) but the thing is, i knew this was all going to happen seven years ago. heck, i knew this was going to happen fifteen years ago, at the start of high school. so it doesn't in any way seem like an accomplishment, or progress, because it was always a given that i was going to be a mathematician. it would maybe seem like an accomplishment, or progress, if i were doing anything else, which is kind of weird.

and of course i still haven't found my true love, or if i have things haven't worked out yet. (i would say that right now, trying to be as objective as possible, the odds are about 1/3 that i have met the person i will end up marrying already, 1/3 that i haven't met them, and 1/3 that they don't exist, although of course the even distribution is more motivated by pith than by veracity.) meanwhile, if you look at my friends from harvard '00, almost all of them are married or in long-term relationships. and the ones who haven't are doing things like being scientific advisors to congress.

despite all this, i think i've probably improved over the last seven years. i understand how the world works better. i've certainly gained life management skills. i've gained some maturity, certainly a lot if you filter out the meta-effects stemming from the lack of true love thing. i think i'm smarter. there's a small sample size caveat here, since over the past few weeks i've really been in excellent shape (see recent entries), but i really think even long-term the trend is upwards. i guess what i really mean is that it's hard to see why someone who would date the 2000 me wouldn't date the 2007 me, but it's easy to see why someone would date the 2007 me but not the 2000 me.

i've been thinking some about what happens in 12 months. just to take a concrete dilemma, suppose it comes down to taking a job at vanderbilt university (a fine school in a decent-sized city where i happen to know nobody) versus taking a job at a hedge fund in the bay area. have i progressed to the point where i could survive psychologically (by which i mean socially) in a city where i have no seed? i empirically failed this three years ago, after all, and i feel like i have had no relevant epiphanies in the meantime. heck, look at the difference between college and grad school: it's right there on my facebook page, in the "networks with the most friends," which reads:

that's right, college overwhelms everything else. berkeley is lumped in with two schools to which i have never had any connection (mit and princeton) and an area where i have never lived in since i left it for college (new york), well back in the pecking order. heck, by random chance i have more friends at the other bay area school, the one i didn't even go to. it paints a pretty stark picture of my ability to meet people outside a college environment.

and the thing is, i still thrive in these college environments for the most part. meredith's friends seemed to like me a lot (although i admit i did feel a bit old around them.) at the duluth reu, i seem to have no problem with either the hanging out or the actual conversations (although i admit that it gets a bit harder every year to relate to the students as peers; i think that this is partly because many math people are off the charts, and certainly i have no problem relating to this year's "normal" ones.) at bridge tournaments everything is great. but in the real world? i still haven't really figured out how to do it, which is a scary prospect for a life in nashville or equivalent.

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