There are many things I like about my job. So much that—as I was telling the other day to one of my graduate students—I believe that having my kind of life ends up damaging you too much to be able to do anything else. Now, I know there are plenty of counterexamples: people who did math very intensely for a long time and are now well integrated into the corporate world. But I have a point.

First, being a mathematician, you are basically your own boss. And you get used to that. Besides relatively rare faculty meetings, the only time you really have blocked is teaching-related: the few hours you are in front of a blackboard, and office hours if you have them—in France, they don’t exist. Other than that, you are master of your time. You decide when to work and when not, when to prepare, when to grade, when to meet your collaborators or your graduate students, and so on. With rare exceptions, there is also nobody telling you that you must do this or that by next week. Yes, one ends up working a lot, but unless you have class, if you want to take Tuesday off, nobody will say, or even think, anything about it. One often works during the weekend, or during the summer, or at weird hours, but it is you who is choosing to do that. I love that freedom.

Incidentally, for the two mathematicians who might be lost enough to be reading this, I agree that, being in the CNRS and being a parasite, I have more of this freedom than most other people. I also agree that there are a few heroes of labor among us who, more or less voluntarily, become head of this, dean of that, chair of the other thing, and these people have a much more packed schedule than most. I am really grateful for their existence, but they are very free and know that they could just do much less and nobody would be bossing them over. They largely do it because they find their contribution important, because they find it fulfilling. I guess there are also some people who like being “boss,” but even in this case, it is still their decision to do it.

Another thing I like about my job is that, other than mental institutions, I cannot think of any other body more open to weirdness and weirdos than math departments. Sometimes this has the effect that, when seeing people who work in the real world, one sometimes wishes one knew more “normal” people instead of all the weirdos one is surrounded by. If one is honest, many mathematicians are socially kind of awkward. But this enormous tolerance gives us liberty. I mean, how many people at Crédit Lyonnais have you seen walking around town carrying a cured ham (to be precise, “una paletilla”), cutting it while walking, as if they were fiddling? How often do you see pretty senior people at Johnson & Johnson only plug in the fridge in their apartment when they have bought durian? How often does the lead speaker in a company meeting at Pfizer, somebody who at the time finds themselves in a wheelchair, jump out of the wheelchair and start impersonating Dr. Strangelove? How often do fund managers never wear shoes, even in winter? How often do senior people perform belly dances during office events at Walmart? The list could go on forever, but what is clear is that these people feel pretty free. You also see the same sense of liberty in the hobbies and obsessions of the people around you. There are people obsessed with making knives, with cappuccinos, making professional-level desserts or music, people who cry because they won’t be able to plant all the tomato varieties they can get seeds for, and so on. The tolerance for weirdness in math departments makes us free, and this is something I love about my job.

Now, all of that, and the really important fact that I get paid for it, is the background for my job and my life. Then there is the job itself. There is teaching—yes, I sometimes do teach—, writing papers, refereeing papers, learning something, going to talks and giving them, working with people, and such. Although there are parts I deeply hate—dealing with journals in any form or shape, I am talking about you—, and there are things I often find pointless—going to talks, unless I am in the mood to ask one question per minute—, I really enjoy most of it. I like very much wondering about the gender of the angels, or whatever it is called what I work on, and I actually like the work of writing papers. I like very much not teaching, but then I love teaching.

But the part I like most is having graduate students.

Currently, I have two students, but one of them is not based here. However, she has spent the past three months here, and it has been great. I enjoyed meeting with her three times a week, talking math, seeing her make enormous progress, seeing her happy with what she was doing, seeing her explain to me—very politely—why I was full of shit when claiming something. I also read, and corrected, uncountably many versions of the paper she wrote, always marking everything in really aggressive red, celebrating as a goal when I found a grammar mistake, and always telling her that writing is a creative activity and that if she decided that she was going to write her paper in endecasyllables, it was my job to tell her that it was probably a bollocks idea, but that she could always tell me to get lost because, at the end of the day, it was her call. We also talked books, politics, cooking, my most recent obsessions, climbing, working in pubs, traveling, climate change, women in math, you name it. She came over a couple of times to have dinner at home; sometimes we had a pint during work at lunchtime at the pub, went to have oysters and white wine by the market, and we often talked in (mostly pretty shitty) cafes. All of that is part of having a good relationship, and having graduate students is largely that.

These people don’t know what it is to do research. They see a mountain in front of them and constantly think they will never manage to really climb it. They believe that everybody else is way smarter than they are. They are stressed, and a large part of the job is to show oneself as the idiot one is, to demystify oneself, demystifying in the process the whole thing, freeing them of the stress of having to do something they have no idea what it is, nudging them to do the super cool things they can do. Doing all of this is enormously satisfying. It is what I like most about my job. You could say that what I like is to talk about a math problem, making calculations or drawings, doing my little to empower somebody else to do what they already can do without they knowing that they can, all while having oysters and white wine. Cabernet Sauvignon for me.