OT: Would a, could a, should a

Hindsight probably isn't nearly as perfect as we might imagine. Foresight is often just a lucky guess.

I had to choose between being a bio or a math major and chose bio. However, I later taught myself programming and made it one career. My uni roomate, however, was a math major. I remember three things from waybackthen.

His first programming course was FORTRAN. He would prepare his program on punch cards and submit them for batch processing on Friday, only to get back the fan-paper printout the following Monday with "Syntax error line 210."

His math books, however advanced, all seemed to have titles starting "Introduction to ..."

And lastly this sentence from a book preface, which he read aloud and has remained with me to this day: "Differential equations, like black olives, are an acquired taste"

Djin, lover and reader of math topics.

GoBucks said...
And then there was the constipated mathematician. He worked it out with a pencil.

And the man who swallowed his glass eye and went to the proctologist, but, too embarrassed, said only that he had a pain "down there". The doc says "OK, hop on the table", inserts the scope, sees the eye looking back at him, and says "Mr. Jones, I'll be happy to be your doctor, but you have to first learn to trust me."

Djin

I have read that surveys done over the years indicate that many who have worked in medical support jobs, such as lab technicians, tissue experts, pharmacy people and such, would have preferred to have been doctors, if they could re-do their lives. On the grounds that they could have helped people more.

Well, maybe.

Or maybe the grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence, or greener in some past year.

And not to digress too much from the thread topic, but a form of this question also applies very readily to personal relationships as well. What if I had married Patricia or Eleanor instead of Marilyn? How would my life have been different?

There's another universe somewhere where that happened. I married one of those others, and was a Classics professor instead of a librarian. Different kids, lived in a different city, and all the rest.

We can never know what that other universe, and maybe it's even going on right now with another me, is like.

But it's very intriguing to imagine.

Just like imagining what being a Classics professor would have been like for me.

One of the great things about being a Mathematician and having a job as such is that there are few who can refute what you say, except of course other Mathematicians.
I have reviewed the I should have situation, at least as it comes to the military. I got out early in the late 70s when they asked who wants out. I went for it, but to my regret, I left. But, to my great joy I left, I have two sons and a daughter that I wouldn't have if I left. Also have my current wife that I wouldn't have. I guess the same goes for mathematician, I have to give up those people that I love. I'm happy where I'm at.

Speaking of random genes. My Uncle Jim was the lead scientist on the development of the SQUID device. My Uncle Ward has patents on technology still used today in all commercial jets. My dear Mother had a chemical engineering degree and worked as a radiation chemist for the state of KS, and had also worked at Oak Ridge National Labs in the late 40s. She had to quit due to radiation poisoning.
Me, I write 3-4000 line sql queries that no one really understands.

I'm getting ready to take the amazon machine learning certification exam in about a week Machine learning artificial intelligence is growing fast

I was a HISTORY major at a small state school in NJ but didn't feel a calling to become a teacher. So I went the business route, got an MBA from a Big School and have worked in Finance for close to 33 years.

After I got the cancer news and multiple treatments - I decided to go back to HISTORY but via Archaeology - taking some courses at Rutgers and doing a dig this summer. Maybe retire in a year and go do some digs on a more regular basis. And yes, all the books in Archaeology are "Introduction to..."

As for the aforementioned MATH, I hated it as a teenager (I think I wasn't taught to or smart enough to appreciate it). But as the years went on, I became quite good at using math in business - same with computers and some basic SQL programming.

I taught Healthcare Math for 16 years at a community college.

My math education ended with Calc II (integrals). No Diff-eq or worse. I was sick for a week in 9th grade and missed the lessons on factoring quadratics, so I never really learned how to do it. So I majored in Biology with a chemistry minor (I was a failed pre-med--I had the play hard figured out, but not the work hard).

Here's a chemistry joke: Old Chemists never die, they just fail to react. Or, they reach equilibrium.

Halbert, I get it, my mother would have loved it!!
trailguy, 8th grade I stunk it up in math, it was pre-algebra, no one explained to my hormone raged self what a variable was, yes I was that dumb.
But I did well enough that they made me take Algebra 1 and 2 in 9th grade.
Stunk it up enough, only passed because I was out for track.
Never looked back at it until I went to college at 25.
Told myself that I would take Intermediate Algebra just to see how dumb I was. Got an A.
So I took College Algebra got an A, then took Trig got an A, and I loved it the whole time.
So I tried Calc and never looked back.

My dad was a PhD in Organic Chemistry, and he made a 40 year career of making students miserable by teaching O-chem at 8 am. His classic introduction to Organic went something like this: "This is Organic Chemistry, my name is Dr. ___. According to the latest edition of the CRC handbook, there are 8 million organic compounds. By the end of the year--if you make it that far--you will know how to name and draw all of them, and you will know how to synthesize at least 1/2 of them."

He was also devastated when I got too old for boy scouts. Boy's Life was his go-to source for classroom jokes.

Some of you may get this: When in doubt, close the ring.

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who understand math and those who don't.