The Article below was published in Vol. 136, Issue 5 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on February 19, 2021.
By Jovana Jovanovska ’23
Staff Writer
jovanovskaja@mx.lakeforest.edu
Professor Arthur Bousquet is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics who has been teaching at the College since 2018.
Bousquet finished his undergraduate degree in engineering and applied mathematics in Paris, France, and moved to Indiana University to receive a PhD in applied mathematics. Before coming to Lake Forest College, he was a postdoc at Pennsylvania State University for three years. Stentor staff spoke with Professor Bousquet about his academic interests and leisure activities.
Stentor: What is something students do not know about you?
Professor Bosquet: They know I play video games. They know I drink coffee. They even know who my friends are. I don’t think they know that I eat tacos every Wednesday.
Stentor: How did you decide to come to Lake Forest?
Professor Bosquet: In math, you don’t have many choices. You get a few offers and then you just get to pick. I got an offer at Lake Forest and I chose to come here. This is the place where I got along the most with staff and students. I don’t know if other professors [eat] lunch with students here, but mine went really well and I really liked my students. In other colleges, when you have an interview it’s usually one or two students that have been forced to talk to the professor. Here there were actually five or six students at lunch and they seemed very interested in the department.
Stentor: What is your current research?
Professor Bosquet: Right now we’re trying to work with Rosalind Franklin University. The goal is to have MRA scans of brains to be able to detect if veterans have brain injuries. This research is my priority right now. We need to develop a machine algorithm to guess if the image the computer is looking at can conclude if there’s a specific type of brain damage. We’ll see if it’s possible to do this.
Stentor: Would you change your career to do something else besides teaching?
Professor Bosquet: Not really. If I had to change something, I would be an accountant. It sounds like fun since you’re at your desk doing your stuff. It seems pretty relaxed. The reason I studied math was because if you do math usually you can choose whatever you want to do afterward. I was undecided and I continued doing math to see what happened. At [the] PhD [level], they force you to teach and I had a lot of fun doing that so that’s how I stayed a professor.
Stentor: What’s the most challenging thing about being a professor?
Professor Bosquet: Communicating with the students. I think in one way and I think that’s the best direction for the class, but sometimes getting them to understand can be hard. I just teach and at the end of class sometimes I think I should have made myself more clear, so I try to remember to explain it to the students in the next class.
Stentor: Can you talk a bit about the difference between the American and French educational systems?
Professor Bosquet: Americans don’t want to fail. The main difference I would say is grading. In France, we give bad grades. There is no curve. Passing doesn’t matter, what matters is your rank. You can have a 5 out of 20 and still pass. The thing I like more about Europe than the US is that to pass to the next year, you look at the average of all your classes. If you’re a math major, for example, you need to do well in math but you can fail in history and you can still pass. For me, I would get a 1 out of 20 in English and I would still pass because I would get good grades in math. Another thing is you don’t talk to your professors. You might not know your professors even after a year.
Stentor: What is something you can do without ever getting bored?
Professor Bosquet: Does anyone have a hobby they never get bored of? I guess I don’t get bored of video games. Right now, I’m playing Overwatch.
Stentor: If you could go anywhere in the world, where would that be and why?
Professor Bosquet: I hate traveling so this is hard to answer. When you travel you lose time, you lose an entire day. The only difference is that you get better weather than where you were before. If I could go anywhere, I guess I would go to Italy. That’s where I used to go with my family for vacation, so I would go to the same place as I used to go before.
Stentor: If your friends would describe you with one word, which one would that be?
Professor Bosquet: Probably rigid. If you make plans with me, you can’t change them. Canceling is fine, but don’t tell me we’re going to do something else. I’m not very flexible with plans.
