Collaboration station
I think a lot about why I'm a mathematician. (Welcome to my identity crisis!) I enjoy doing research and teaching. It's not clear to me that pure math research is necessarily the best use of such a huge source of brainpower, but I think teaching can be quite meaningful. I also greatly enjoy the flexible schedule. But the thing that brings me the most happiness is the relationships I've built in mathematics, especially many of the ones that I've built over the past 15 years since I started grad school. Through the course of your career you get to see how people grow as mathematicians and as people, which is really lovely. These relationships exist in all aspects of my math life (collaborators, colleagues at NCSU, mentors, former mentees, etc). There's a lot more blog posts I want to write about personal relationships in math, but I wanted to write something about collaborations in this entry. Here's a few quick opinions I have on various aspects and sta