Student Profiles
Margaret Doig
Class of 2005
Honors Math and Honors Philosophy
Now a fourth-year graduate student at Princeton University, Doig is pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her specialty is topology, which she describes as the study of “the spaces in which other people do math.”
One of the wonderful things about the honors program is that they set up an environment in which you can grow and learn, and you don’t have to worry about a lot of bureaucracy. It’s an environment in which you can do anything you can think of to grow up academically and intellectually as an interested human being.
Each person in the program is really interesting. They pick a good mix of as many unusual people as they can find. It was very nice to have this big, balanced group. I made friends, and I learned to think like an adult and discovered that I loved talking to people who didn’t automatically start in the same place I did.
For instance, it was good to talk to all the humanities majors. Even though I was also a philosophy major, it would have been really easy for me to get isolated since I spent so much of my time learning to analyze things like a mathematician. Fortunately, I had several good friends in the honors program who were learning to be historians or writers or lawyers. We had very good arguments about history and philosophy and politics, and I learned a lot about how to think.
I remember the first friend I met in the honors seminar. He hadn’t said much in class, and afterward as we were walking out he said, “I thought it was interesting how you made that point in class. What do you think about … ” And we sat down in a little café in O’Shaughnessy Hall and talked for three hours. That was my first day in the honors program.
My freshman year, I was at one point feeling overwhelmed by my classes, especially my math classes. I was trying to figure out how much time I wanted to spend on math. I talked to Professor Alex Hahn, and he said that a Nobel-Prize-winning friend of his once told him that graduate school is for learning to be really good in your area of interest. But being an undergrad, he said, is about getting a life.
That made sense to me, because the honors program is designed to develop individuals as whole people. It’s going to make you a better-rounded person, and it’s going to give you some of the cultural background that you might want to function well in the real world.
