Why Math?
The subject is remote and incomprehensible to many. I’m often asked why I study it at all.
In conversation, I am often asked what I am studying — what else, after all, would one ask when making small talk with a college student? Family friends or distant relatives have found themselves in a situation in which they need to make conversation with me, someone whom they vaguely remember is teenaged and in college somewhere or other, so they default to a few questions about my course of study.
Now, mathematics is a subject that is inherently inaccessible, simply because, unless you pursue a STEM field involved with higher-level mathematics, you might rarely encounter math beyond arithmetic in your day-to-day life. In addition, math anxiety is incredibly prevalent, which causes many people to avoid it at all costs. As such, most people I talk to outside of my fellow STEM students, our instructors, and professionals in such fields either have very little knowledge of mathematics and/or an intense dislike of it.
This can, of course, make the aforementioned small talk more difficult than necessary. Besides “so you want to be a math teacher?” (I can think of few things I would like to do less), I sometimes am just asked “oh, why?” (perhaps with a shudder at the memories of grade-school math trauma).