Reflections on a Tumultuous Week

As we witness a rise in transphobia and general hate on "popular" social media platforms, I've decided to try my hand at the ancient art of blogging. This space will be a blend of the professional and the personal — a place to share my thoughts on academia, my career, my research, and whatever else feels pressing or important.

This week, in particular, has been overwhelming. It feels like a perfect storm of personal, professional, and political upheaval.

A Fraught Political Landscape

The start of Trump’s second term has brought with it a wave of unease. His flurry of "executive orders" are, quite frankly, as terrifying as they are blatantly unconstitutional. Like many, I’m oscillating between anger and despair, but the sense of urgency to engage in meaningful resistance has never felt stronger.

Career Worries and Waiting

On a more personal note, I find myself anxiously waiting for news from schools about potential tenure-track positions. It’s a nerve-wracking process—one that leaves me questioning my worth and constantly second-guessing my choices. The academic job market is notoriously competitive, and patience is not my strong suit. So here I am, somewhere between freaking out and holding out hope as January comes to an end.

A Return to Berkeley

In the midst of all this, I’ve moved back to Berkeley for another semester to start my postdoc at SLMath. This vibrant academic environment is both thrilling and daunting. It’s a reminder of the joy of intellectual exploration but also of the pressures that come with it. It seems like everyone else is so much better at this and I'm struggling to be a "good" postdoc. Moreover, as opposed to the last few times, this time, I feel like the sore thumb amongst mathematicians. Being out of my comfort zone is, unsurprisingly, uncomfortable, yes, but it’s also where growth happens. Or so I keep telling myself...

A Personal Loss

Finally, this week brought the loss of my maternal aunt. Grief has a way of magnifying everything else, doesn’t it? Well, I'll let you know because I don't think I've really made space to process this. I loved my aunt. We hadn't talked much lately, and since my transition/graduation, we had drifted further and further apart. Everything else has me looking carefully at the future, and this bit of news reminds me that I should put more value in how it will feel to look back.

Looking Ahead

In short, I’m scared about the future, worried about my career, and navigating an unfamiliar emotional landscape. But I’m also here, writing this, which feels like a small act of defiance and self-expression when the world/government/academia are telling me to be small and quiet. Blogging might not change the world, it may not fix anything, but it’s a start. It’s a way to process, to share, and to connect.

Here’s to more posts, more honesty, and, hopefully, a little more clarity in the weeks to come.

A Math Thought

This is inspired by my new office mate Simon Briend, who told me about some of his research interests today. Fix a graph G with maximum degree d and a proper k-coloring of where . Consider the random process that at each iteration picks a random rainbow set S (set of vertices where no two share the same color) of size at most d + 1 and adds a new vertex to G with S as its neighborhood and extend f to be a proper coloring of the new graph. Run this process for T >> |G|  iterations. Let G' and f' and be the final graph and proper coloring. Given G' and f', can you give a subset V of G of size at most O(|G|) such that every vertex in G is contained in V?