Why Do I Pursue My Major?

When I was applying for colleges my senior year of high school, my mother told me that no matter what I majored in, I should minor in mathematics. She believed that employers know that nobody can go to college for math and be stupid. Following her advice, I began at James Madison University (JMU) with a math minor. It took just one semester of Calculus III for me to reconsider my major. Before the end of my freshman year of college, I changed my major to mathematics.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I inquired about doing some independent work. I ached to do something divergent from the usual classroom setting. My Advanced Linear Algebra professor, Dr. Josh Ducey agreed to oversee an independent study with me. I would later end up doing research with him. We investigated properties of the Smith normal form of matrices associated with hypercube graphs. The most eye-opening part of doing research was seeing how different branches of mathematics, which I typically learned in

When I started at JMU, I was a slacker. I was not taking school seriously and I failed a class my freshman year because of that. One of my professors told me that I was not doing as well in my coursework as I could, and I knew she was right. Moreover, I knew that I was not going to succeed in grad school unless something changed. Now, It is incredibly difficult to break an entire lifetime of poor work ethic, but the results of my perseverance are clear. I have made Dean’s List every semester starting my junior year. My GPA went from a 3.40 my freshman/sophomore years to a 3.73 my junior/senior years. My math GPA also rose from a 3.70 to a 3.93 in that same time period. My senior year, I became the recipient of JMU’s Carl Droms Scholarship, an award to an outstanding senior math major. I am simply not the same student I was when I started college, and I hope to be given the opportunity to continue to grow as a