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Short Career Interview

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In my short career search, I interviewed two people: Vernon Hilbert and Ryan Christ. Vernon Hilbert is a retired professor and Ryan Christ is a PhD student at Oxford studying Population Genetics.
Personal and Educational History
Vern came from a lower-class background; he went to Allentown High School, a large, urban public high school. In high school, he excelled in chemistry and mathematics, winning a statewide math competition. Vern says that Chemistry was his first love. After high school, he began college at Lehigh university, majoring in chemical engineering. However, due his family’s reluctance to help him pay the sky-high $800/year tuition, he had to transfer to the more affordable Millersville university, where he majored in the physical …show more content…

Although he was hired to teach Chemistry, there was a mix-up and he became a math teacher. This was because the school administration thought that Vern majored in math, and then tried to give him math classes instead of chemistry classes. Vern welcomed this mistake, since he hated the head of the Chemistry department. He began teaching lower level courses, such as geometry, but was eventually given the school’s two calculus classes after the former Calculus teacher had a heart attack. Vern said that calculus was his favorite course to teach at Upper Darby because he got to work with some of the school’s best students. While he certainly enjoyed teaching these advanced students, Vern did not have a good relationship with the school’s administration. This, of course, was totally unfounded, since school administrators are always so reasonable, as proven by Pottsgrove School District. He recalls a time when his calculus class was being observed by an administrator whom Vern considered too stupid to ever learn calculus. Vern said that this administrator then criticized him for having crooked window shades in his …show more content…

At Oxford, Ryan researches fast algorithms to determine which genes are responsible for a certain trait. These algorithms rely on Graph theory, the theory of Stochastic Processes and Probability Theory. Oftentimes, these algorithms will work with a graph in which vertices represent random variables, and weighted, directed edges represent varying degrees of codependence among the variables. However, as these graphs become large, computing the exact distributions of the random variables quickly becomes computationally impossible. Ryan’s research involves finding subgraphs of these large graphs which behave almost independently. He compared this process to finding invariant subspaces of a linear transformation in Linear Algebra. Ryan said that life as a graduate student is very unstructured, yet also very busy. He also noted that, at British colleges, grading is based on a final exam only. This certainly seems daunting, but it also seems to allow students to focus solely on learning during the class, instead of grades. Also, at English universities, a PhD program consists solely of research, as opposed to the American system, which combines research with

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