the crierpodcast 4

The transcription is a podcast episode featuring an interview with Cameron Jensen, the president of the Math Club at Corning Community College. The Math Club aims to make math more accessible and enjoyable for students by organizing events and activities. They have had successful events in the past, such as Pi Day and a Pi Baking Instructional. They have upcoming events like Bear Invites, where students can present their projects, and a dog walk activity. The Math Club meets every Thursday from 2 to 3 p.m. in Library Room 121. To stay updated, students can join the email list or contact Cameron Jensen. Good afternoon, Red Barons. This is Joshua Dineskos, your Editor-in-Chief of The Crier Newspaper. Welcome back. This is Episode 4. We have another interview this go-around, right before break, and it is going to be about Math Club. I know math is a scary word for many of us, especially me, but maybe after this podcast you might have a different perspective on all things mathematics. We have here with us today our own contributor to The Crier. He's a member of The Crier Newspaper, but he's a senior member of the Math Club. We have Cameron Jensen, and he's going to introduce himself. Well, hello everybody. Joshua, if I'm already giving the gist, but my name is Cameron Jensen. I'm an engineering student here. This is my last semester, and I founded the Math Club a couple semesters ago with a few friends, and I'm currently the sitting president. So with the Math Club, you founded it so you must have goals and visions for the Math Club. What would those be? Probably the primary thing that we're aiming for really is to make math more accessible and enjoyable for people, right? And what I mean by that, like when people are coming here, oftentimes math is a very scary thing. It's a scary thing just in general. And so, you know, and that was no different for us when we started the club, but we had some kind of a passion for science and for math, and so we thought, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be as scary as a lot of people are kind of making it out to be. And so we decided, what if we made a club out of it? You know, what if we got together and just kind of worked on math, had social time together, and just kind of see where it went? And as that progressed, we had, you know, math themed events and stuff, and it's just, it's grown into something a lot bigger than it was as it started, which was kind of just a little social group. And it's turned out to be this kind of blossoming club where we're trying to introduce people to math, and in a way that's not as intimidating. No, I totally see that. I, just to let our listeners know, even though I am a person who has been scared of math my entire educational career, I joined the math club just a couple days ago, and I saw the email list for the first time, and it is absolutely massive. This is something I was not expecting, again, because I feel like I hang around with a lot of people who don't like math, and that's exactly why I joined the math club, because I wanted to be around people who have a love for math and a little bit less fearful about it. We do have some activities to talk about, so Cameron, really quick, could you give us some ideas of what some past activities have been, including your Pi Day, which I thought was very fun, but maybe there's a couple more things you might want to point out. Yeah, I mean, the biggest event that we've been known for is Pi Day, and actually it was Pi Week this year. The main event of that being, of course, Pi and your professors. The first year we had a pretty big turnout. I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but it was, we filled up the commons, more or less, and then recently, this past event, we had about the same turnout. We had a lot of professors show up, a lot of students, you know, we went for probably an hour, like 20 plus cans of whipped cream, and that was a great event. And then we also had, this year, we had a Pi Baking Instructional in Perry Hall, where we kind of brought students in from Perry Hall and a few from outside, and we just baked pies together. A lot of people don't have experience cooking and baking, you know, their first year of college, so we figured it would be a good opportunity to kind of help people get into the art of cooking and then also, you know, throw a little bit of math in there, right? There's kind of the pun with the Pi and, of course, the math, the mathematical constant as well. That had a pretty good turnout. So, I have to ask, how many digits do you have memorized? Oh, God, putting me on the spot here. All right, I'm going to send it, all right? Okay, go for it. How much longer do you have in this episode? Oh, we're at five minutes, so we have 15 minutes. 3.141592653589793238462643383. That's all I got. Well, that's impressive already. I didn't count those, but it's like, yeah. No, that's okay, that's impressive already. Now, do Euler's constant. 2.7, I forgot. No, that's really impressive, and I think no one needs to know all the digits of Pi or anything like that, but there are things out there that are certainly full of wonder. The fact that that number and various numbers like it never end. I remember, well, we probably measured it out to probably millions of digits already. Oh, yeah, billions and billions of digits. We know they're rational. So, that's cool, and, you know, I have to give a shout out to my math professor himself, George Horvath, who took a pie to the face, and I really got all my angst against math out, and I apologize to my professor, but again, thank you for standing in for math itself. So, let's talk about some future events and activities that you got coming up. I saw the agenda, but maybe an explanation as to what Bear Invites is and, of course, your dog walk event is. Yeah, so Bear Invites is our new event that we came up with. We're aiming to get it started right after break, and it's kind of tangentially related to the math club. What we're trying to do is we're trying to give students a bit more of an opportunity to put themselves out there and talk about projects they've done, research they've done, or even just academic topics that they're interested in generally. We have the Student Expo every year, which has a pretty big turnout usually, and if you're not familiar with that event, it's where students who have completed any kind of project for one of their classes or outside of their classes can go and present that project to their peers and to a panel of judges, and there's a lot of monetary prizes involved, there's gift cards involved, and all that fun stuff, and that's a really great event, but it only happens once per year, and so we wanted to give kind of more of an opportunity at a small school like this for people to get involved and share what they're doing and share their projects, and so that's how we came up with this, and we're hoping that it's gonna kind of be like a TED Talk style event. You can sign up for a time slot, five to fifteen minutes, and just get up there in front of the crowd, which I don't know how big of a crowd it's gonna be, I guess we'll see, and talk about your interests, and we're gonna have prizes involved, we're gonna have, you know, Q&A sessions, etc., and there will be free pizza, so if for nothing else. If for nothing else, there's two things about that activity that excites me the most, is one, the math involved of increasing one's income by winning, so you already have an income, you can add to that, adding is math, and that is what we're all about, and the crowd, of course, the crowd will depend upon our listeners. If they're hearing this right now, get involved, or at least be there to hear about some of these projects. People have put a lot of time and effort into these particular projects, and it's good just to support your fellow student, your fellow Red Baron, and it empowers them to keep going. That is probably, you know, one of the reasons that we exist, is to empower people, and I would think mathematics probably empowers almost everything that we do. You can't get away from it, you can't escape it, so at least let's try to enjoy it, especially when it's presented in a fun TED Talk-like way. Let's talk about the dog walk activity. I wanted some more information, because one, I love dogs, and what does that have to do with math? What does it have to do with math? Basically nothing, if we're being honest. We do walk the Fibonacci Trail in Spencer Crest, which is math adjacent, because it's, I don't know if you've ever walked the Fibonacci Trail before? Never. But there's signs every so often that are explaining the influence and like the meaning of the Fibonacci sequence, which is a very, very famous sequence of numbers in math, that it comes up from in just like basic multiplication, all the way up through basically every level of math. You can find some reference to it, or something that exhibits that pattern, and the trail is kind of made to talk about that, I guess. I'm not really an expert on like the trail itself, and how it's set up, but that's where the math connection comes in. And you're going to be walking dogs? We're going to be walking dogs. Where are we getting these dogs? Can we keep the dog? We actually abduct them, all of them, and we do not get them back. No, students that are on the walk, you know, a lot of people in our club have dogs, and so if the weather's nice, we just kind of get together and walk the trail, and of course we bring the dogs with us. And it's just a really fun event, you know, kind of celebrating the start of spring and nice weather. Yeah, awesome. That sounds really fun. I may just join you guys just because I want to walk a dog. I don't have one, but that's okay. Perhaps someone would let me borrow theirs. I'd be super grateful. I'll bring some treats. And then I guess just to kind of wrap this up, let's go ahead and talk about current meeting times and how to get involved with just like the bare bone basics, maybe not necessarily the events coming up. Where are you meeting? What time are you meeting? What should we bring? So we meet once a week on Thursday from 2 to 3 p.m. in Library Room 121, which is the conference room in the back of the Learning Commons, if you're familiar with that area. We also do have an email list, and so if you want to get added to that and get notified of the meeting time every week, as well as like an agenda and stuff, you can email either me, that's my email is cjensen6 at corning-cc.edu, or you could talk to our faculty advisor, Jay Hobart. A lot of you have probably had her for math, or really any of the math faculty. They're all involved in our club in some way, so reach out to your math teacher if you want to hear more about us. Fantastic. So before we sign off of this particular episode of this podcast, I understand we're going to go way back to the very beginning of this conversation. We're going to talk about not being scared of math. So this is really going to be the more philosophical part of the conversation, because we got all the nitty-gritty, the facts out of the way. Let's talk about how someone like me, who has struggled with math, who has been scared of math for a variety of reasons, but it's just like I dread having to do my math homework. I dread the idea that the program I'm in is math heavy. So I just have to eventually learn how to to overcome that fear and start enjoying it. And the reason why I joined math club is so that I could be around people who love math and maybe it would rub off on me, because I think that's that's true with anything. If you want to be a good leader, you surround yourself with good leaders. If you want to be a good, successful, rich business person, surround yourself with rich people or successful people. You never want to surround yourself with people who bring you down. So if I've been scared of math this entire time, I need to step out of my comfort zone, hang out with the people who are good at math, and by osmosis, I will absorb kind of maybe that that love for math. And already, just talking about it, I actually have a greater appreciation. And don't forget that you can always get tutoring help if you still struggle, no matter if you love it or not. And Cameron is, in fact, a tutor. Yes, I am. And so he will help you as he's helped me. So Cameron, your personal idea, just in one or two minutes, how can people who are scared of math start loving math? I guess I know this kind of sounds like corny advice in a way, but you have to learn to love the struggle of it. It's kind of it's like anything that's really, really difficult. It's the reward in it comes from the success, comes from the end of the road, like you complete that hard problem you've been working on for an hour, you know, and that's the reward you get. And that's not really an alien concept, I feel like, just in general across entertainment. I can ask you a question. Are you a video gamer? No, I am not, but I have played video games, so yeah. Okay, so some of the most popular games in the world are popular because of how difficult they are, in that it's a struggle to get through and it takes a lot of time and effort and perseverance, but finishing that experience is the reward of it. And so, like, I'll be honest, I was terrified of math at first, too. I still am in some ways. Like, I dread doing my math homework sometimes. Like, I know it's due tomorrow and, you know, I got to sleep at some point. So, you know, I don't think there are tedious parts of math. There always will be. But getting into it for the purpose of that reward, there's a fair bit of masochism involved. I'm sure there is. Actually, sometimes a lot of bit of masochism involved. But you come to appreciate it, especially looking back, you know, on the math you may have done in the past and kind of finally seeing all those connections come through. There are a lot of connections in math that you don't really see as we're going through it, but as you get to the higher level, you start to see where all of these different things kind of converge and, like, the web of information starts to connect. And that's just a really cool feeling to look back and say, oh, well, that's what the trig functions actually mean. I thought that was just the size of a triangle, you know. So, it's an appreciation that grows over time, and it really does come from just persevering through the hardest parts. I definitely feel that. And I can say from my perspective, it is an acquired taste. Absolutely, yes. You have to work on acquiring that taste, like with food or wine. You know, as a psalm, there's many wines I've tasted, and I'm like, this is, what is this? This is disgusting. But then, over time, I learned to appreciate it. And if I do a Baron Bites, I am going to do something on wine. Sure. How many bottles does it take to get me drunk? The acquired taste comes with time, it comes with practice, and it comes with a little bit of pain. But in the end, you understand the beauty in the universe, which is truly mathematical. Yeah. All right. So, I think this is a very successful podcast. I thank you for coming on and spending time with us, talking about a subject that scares a lot of people, but maybe we can get Corning Community College to love math a little more through the Math Club. So, you heard it here, come to the Baron Bites after break, support your fellow students in their mathematical endeavors, get some free pizza, and learn. So, with that, I will sign off as I usually do. Red Barons, be empowered. Thank you.