Just a tinge of pride.

I'm sitting in yet another lovely café in Budapest. The plethora of cafés with varying atmospheres is something that I will miss about living in a big city, especially a city with such a focus on café culture as Budapest. I am one damn proof away from finishing all my work for Spectral Theory, the course that has taken more of my time than any other in the history of my education. We met with Miklos one last time in this café this morning. I'm really happy to say that I got up the courage to ask him for a letter of recommendation for future endeavors- only one that is concrete in my mind right now, but you never know.  A strong letter of recommendation is invaluable, and I have a feeling he'll write a good one.

And I've learned so much in his course, in this semester here. It's almost as different from my math education at Mills as Germany was, though it's also different from Germany. Different areas of a spectrum. And though now I know what Hilbert Spaces are, can talk about tangent bundles, can think about the spectral radius of infinite graphs, the one thing I am most proud of: as I was typing my final writeup this morning (another amazing thing I've had to become proficient in this semester - using LaTex to type math) and going to check on the things I had typed yesterday, I found that one of my files hadn't saved. About an hour and a half's work of formatting enormous square roots (or 2n-th roots, rather) of vectors and matrix multiplication, limit suprema and infema, and all kinds of subscripts - GONE. And I looked through my files carefully to make sure that I hadn't just overlooked it, and after five minutes of fruitless searching, instead of pouting and griping and swearing, I just retyped it. This time, I remembered the formatting errors I had yesterday and it only took me about forty-five minutes. And it's all done now. I'm most proud of that reaction.

Alright. And now, we will continue what my close friends is calling the 'Spectral Theory Pub Crawl', though café crawl would be more accurate (yet most cafés in Budapest serve a host of alcohol as well, so really, it's pretty synonymous) - where we schlep ourselves and our laptops and notes to several cafés during the day, trying not to over-caffeinate and yet to stay engaged in the corrections, the typing, the formatting, the math - until we're all done!