EPTAnyway, shortly after undergraduate, I had an existential crisis (see http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/507556-choosing-between-music-and-math), and wasn't quite sure what I was doing. I began working the job, and life went on for a while...and then eventually I played StarCraft for a bit.
I was in a really dark place for a while, where I had no idea what I was doing with my life, and I just didn't feel that same spark every day that I used to.
I began studying composing with a teacher in my area, and have made a good amount of progress; I completed my first piano sonata (it's 25 minutes long LOL) in late May 2017, and began working on some orchestral music.
Anyway, during early 2017, one of my best friends decided to switch from Physics to Math major, while he was still at community college. I told him I could help him, since he said he was bored in his math classes, so I began teaching him some upper division stuff when we hung out on the weekends, or during my days off.
I also helped him study for the Putnam, and in doing so, I remembered why I ended up choosing the math major, what it was all about, the feeling of sitting in a coffee shop for hours trying to solve a particularly difficult problem...
And come June of that year, while I still couldn't make up my mind regarding what I wanted to do, I found myself thinking about math every day again, like I used to before my senior year of Undergraduate. I started to really fall in love with Combinatorics (for real though, Stanley's Enumerative Combinatorics is FIRE), and ended up quitting my job that July so that I could study/work on my music full time, while preparing for graduate school applications. I tutored to pay the bills.
July 2017 until now has been a blast; I've been studying every day (both math and music, but mainly math now...), composing, I played chess for a while (but it was starting to take over my life), and yeah...
I ended up applying for both Masters Composition programs and Mathematics Ph.D. programs, and I was hoping to do something in the Algebraic Combinatorics/Combinatorics + Representation theory area, since that's my jam right now. In the meantime, I'm working (fruitlessly) on Frankl's Union-closed sets conjecture...
...I'm also working on my first symphony.
Anyway, grad school decisions were a bit disappointing; I was rejected from both UCLA and UCSD, but luckily I was accepted to the UC Davis Ph.D. program (a great place to be for Combinatorics!), and I will be going there in the fall, so hit me up if you're there!
What a bizarre turn of events...but I wouldn't have had it any other way, honestly. I feel like I needed it to straighten my life out.
