Office Hours

A couple days later I was happily making my way across campus towards Mira's office for her office hours for the first (hopefully of many) time. In the meantime, I had been doing research on her to try and prepare for the interaction. I found out she's a 23 year old Master's student studying for a degree in mathematical computation after getting her Bachelor's in Math and double majoring in Physics. She signed up to being an instructor for this course since her final project revolved around the topic of non-linear dynamics, and attracted the attention of multiple high profile companies. I had spent the past 2 days reading about the first 3 topics in the lesson plan that was part of the course syllabus. I started out with simple Wikipedia articles, moved on to math videos discussing certain theorems, and ended up reading a couple of PhD thesis-level papers, including one that Mira herself contributed to about thermal convection in fluids.

Suffice it to say I was more than ready for whatever came my way (as long as it was something that would be taught within the first month of the course) and was feeling good about it. I arrived in the building where the Mathematics instructors had their offices, and walked towards the end of the hall where the part-timer and student teacher offices where. I stood somewhat nervously in front of her door before knocking 3 times. She opened the door.

"Oh hi, James right? I was expecting you." She said with her patented cute smile. Honestly I was floored that she even bothered to remember my name. Must've made quite the first impression, I thought to myself. She let me in and I sat down in the chair in front of her desk. I had rehearsed my excuse for this visit a thousand times in my head, and now was the time to go through with it.

"So I was going through some math papers just for fun and I saw an interesting one about thermal convection, and it turns out you were one of the authors, so I was wondering if you could answer some of my questions about the findings?" Hook, line, and sinker. She shifted from her usual smile to more of a devilish grin, almost as if she knew what I was doing.

"Ask away."

I walked her through a couple questions that I had read about in a rebuttal paper and asked for further explanations.

Her eyes lit up as she started explaining in great detail all about the experiments, findings, shortcomings, and future research that she had conducted. She spoke so passionately about the subject in a way that I found so sexy. At first, I recognized the language she was using and was keeping up quite well, but halfway through the jargon became way more technical and I was losing grasp on the conversation and started to be mesmerized by her eyes. Soon enough I was just ogling at her with no regard for the subject matter.

"So yeah a lot of interesting observations from the follow up but nothing definitive. At least not definitive enough to prove the theorem."

I just sat there nodding my head while having no idea what she just said. There was an awkward silence for a couple seconds where I felt her staring holes through me, her stare somehow both intoxicating and intimidating at the same time. After the brief silence she spoke up once again.

"Now it's my turn to ask a couple questions, if you don't mind." I was taken aback by this. "Did you really think you could just quote an entire sentence verbatim from a rebuttal paper without me noticing?"

"uhhh..." I was very stunned at her brutal honesty.

"Second question, did you not know that co-authors of a paper are always notified when their people request permission to access their papers through the college library?"

I was just staring at her in silence at this point.

"Final question, why are you actually here, James Miller?"