LenielJerron

Evidently.

I'll give it a shot. My undergrad's career center was basically worthless for me (the one piece of advice that they would give out is, 'make an account on HandShake', and then they did nothing else productive), but maybe at a larger school it will be better.

I'm glad there are people who like programming more than I do! Thanks for the support.

I only spend one hour a week in my office for my office hour.

Looking at my calendar from this past semester I was in 3 courses, which each met for 3 hours had 8-10 hours of homework each week. I attended 4 weekly seminars (1 of which I was helping organize; two of which I presented in some weeks). I taught one course which met for 4 hours, double that for class prep. I had 5 hours regularly scheduled in the tutoring center, plus an office hour. I'm slow at grading, so it often took me 4-6 hours per week. Plus an hour a week for my advising meeting, and we're at 60 hours before I even begin talking about when I'm doing my own research - I typically try to devote my weekends and also Thursday afternoons in their entirety to either reading math books of interest to me or papers of interest to me (I do the rest of that stuff MTWF).

So it's not quite 90 hours a week every week. There are weeks when the tutoring lab was shortstaffed so I needed to pick up an extra three hours there. There were times when I would proctor a 3-hour exam. There were lots of severe injuries in my department this semester so I've covered people's classes too. So there were a lot of 90 hour work weeks just due to the structure of everything, but I guess saying that every week is a 90 hour week is an exaggeration. I don't think I've worked fewer than 75-80 hours a week all semester though.

Yes, my bad, I get all the TLAs mixed up.

Paul Erdos got his PhD in mathematics when he was 20 years old. If you wanted to name a famous academic without a PhD, you should have gone with Freeman Dyson.

But yes, I need to not starve to death in case I need to leave my program. That's why I mentioned jobs.

How broadly do you dislike programming?

After undergrad, it seemed like I had two career paths. I could either apply for PhDs in mathematics, work 90 hours a week for 19k/year in a state a thousand km away from anyone I've ever known; or I could have tried for a cushy entry-level coding job making 6 figures starting salary in an area close to all my friends from undergrad, and working something normal like 40 hours a week. I chose the former.

I am currently doing what little coding I currently am in an effort to get it over and done with ASAP. My plan is to never write another line of code again once I'm done with my numerical analysis courses.

Again, I don't think I can personally work for military contractor companies like Boeing, Northrup, etc.

In undergrad I did a project on harmonic analysis and wavelets, with some attention having been paid to the signal processing applications. (And by that I mean I learned enough to say 'this has applications in the fields of signal processing and image compression' in the abstract). But at this point it's years ago and I don't remember too much.

I took seven computer science courses as an undergraduate, including three that were programming courses designed for people who would go on to be professional programmers (intro, intermediate, advanced programming). I also took other CS courses that included programming components. Every single task that was just, "please program tetris" or something of that sort, I loathed every second of it.

I will not like programming.

Introductory QM is for undergrads, who also know next to nothing about QM, and I'd bet there are plenty of profs who'd like to unload that job and get back to their desks

Yes, so the job would be given to physics grad students. Which I do not know enough physics to apply to be.

If I'm in a position where I'm being thrown out of my grad program with just a masters, I'm not then going to turn around and say, "well, time to do it all over again, this time with a field I'm less passionate about!"