Well, I’ve finally decided to create a blog.  I’d been thinking about creating one for a while, but as you might imagine, it’s been hard to find enough spare time.

Why create this blog?  In the course of obtaining my PhD, I feel like a lot of people have put quite a bit of effort into helping me understand how to approach life in academia.  I’ve also learned quite a few things by trial and error.  In this blog, I hope to encode my experiences in hopes that doing so will help me and others learn from them.  Expect conference reports, teaching experiences, and the like on this blog.

I spent a lot of time thinking about a good title for this blog.  I settled on “Formalized Curiosity” because it perfectly defines academic research.  The original quote, by Zora Neale Hurston, is below.

Research is formalized curiosity.  It is poking and prying with a purpose.