Math Departments and Afternoon Tea

As an undergraduate student, it’s often quite difficult and intimidating to meet and chat with the graduate students, postdocs, and professors within the department. And yet having many of these conversations has been some of the most enriching experience in my undergrad. People farther along in their careers often have solid advice and experience that cannot be found anywhere else; I credit much of my mathematical development to all the supportive people that I have met. However, actually initiating conversation with them is honestly quite terrifying—and this seems to be a universally shared experience among all the friends I’ve talked to about this.

During my undergrad at UCSB, besides taking graduate-level courses, one the main ways I met graduate students was by hanging around during the daily tea time at 3pm. This was a rather humble affair: two packs of generic brand cookies as well as a couple containers of tea brewed in bulk. It was privately funded by two professors—Daryl Cooper and Darren Long—with a budget of about $10 a day. As a result, the majority of the attendance was from graduate students. I suspect that the quality was not quite good enough to attract most of the postdocs and faculty. But in any case, discussing with grad students about the problems and ideas that they were working on at the time really did help expand my mathematical horizons beyond just classes. And the best part is that often I learned about completely new and unexpected topics through just chatting.

However, such spontaneity was only possible with the grad students; my experience meeting professors was much more formal. Generally this involved emails and setting up times to meet beforehand; at UCSB, professors are generally hard to pin down outside of office hours. And the unfortunate thing with these much more formal meetings is that usually there’s not much room for ‘spontaneous’ topics of discussion. Usually you're asking about research in a certain direction, and as an undergrad, the professor usually has (or will prepare) some curated list of topics for you to explore. Of course there’s usually some room for freedom, but the chance to see something completely new and unexpected is just gone.

This past March I attended the visit day for prospective students at Columbia and one of main reasons that I chose to commit to here was the community. At least for the 2 days I was here, it seemed like the majority of the department would turn up for tea time, and people were much more open about starting discussions with anyone they could find. Perhaps my status as a prospective student helped, but I had a blast talking with the various grad students, postdocs, and even faculty within the math department. And this experience isn’t unique to me: many members of my cohort felt the same way, and that made the decision to come here a no-brainer. As an ivy league university, Columbia is able to spend quite a bit of money every day on tea time (several hundred dollars a day, according to some people) and the quality of the refreshments reflects that. There were 4 giant bowls of fruit filled with everything short of durian. It’s probably safe to say that an ambitious undergrad hanging around tea time at Columbia will definitely learn a lot more than I did at the UCSB tea time if they insert themselves into conversations.

My point isn’t to imply that Columbia has a much better environment because they have money; I think that for the most part people at Columbia are a lot more outgoing than at UCSB and that even with less funding this department would still be a lovely place to pursue a PhD at. But money certainly helps grease the wheels of social interaction. The department’s ability to pay for extravagant afternoon teas and seminar dinners means that more people are willing to attend those events. And having a livelier atmosphere with more people definitely gives the opportunity for more meaningful conversations that enrich the participants.