This is a long read. Last Monday, the people of the Philippines (give or take quite a few fraudulent votes) decided to reinstate a dictatorship. It won’t actually happen yet, and the formal process of getting there has been in place since 2016. Yet I feel uneasy about a fascist…

I decided not to push through with what I planned for later this week. Last time, I promised to write an essay about the music organization that changed my life, or at least a sketch of it. I was inspired by a couple of recent Instagram stories and a blog…

It seems that my time away from home has suddenly taken a turn for the gloomy. I saw an Instagram story with a couple I first met ten years ago the other night. Earlier, I saw another story that implied that my real first encounter with another person I had…

I wrote about what I learned from applying to graduate school some time ago. This was when I had my second run of applications. The success rate was reasonably low. I applied to six schools and made it to three. In two cases, I couldn’t make it because of funding…

In my last article on ranked choice voting or the single transferable vote, I mentioned some advantages to that system. I forgot to include one, which requires some further elaboration. Here it is. RCV encourages independents (and minor party candidates) to run in and influence an election without spoiling it…

Yesterday, I saw a fascinating exchange between an Instagram content creator I follow and some of her math-oriented friends. This friend wondered if she could get her preferred candidates for an election if she voted less than the maximum number of candidates she could vote. The electoral system in this…

Over the past two weeks, I was excited about what I was going to do next. I would finish out the year, and then I would do something which I could not talk about right now until it becomes final. Then the big blow came. Someone I trusted for some…

Twenty-two days of January have come and gone, and the best thing that happened was that I was increasingly sure of something. January 6 was the turning point. When the chaos at the US Capitol ensued, I began to reconsider my decision to apply to four universities in the States…

This inaugural essay here on Medium is on a process in which I am still in the middle and have already gone through. When I went to school overseas, I already had in mind applying for a Ph.D. program. It was easier said than done, and when I first tried…