By: Janie Peterson After watching math TAC Evan Mertz perform in the choral music concert last Wednesday, it is clear that he is a versatile staff member, with a love for the arts, a knack for problem solving and great enthusiasm for the Math Department. Chorus director, Gwen Hall luckily knew that Mertz is a bass with the ability to sing the low notes crucial to one of their songs in the concert, “We Are the Music Makers.” Mertz was a GSE choral music student in 2014 and still enjoys singing today in his free time. His other hobbies include all sorts of crafts, especially knitting, which he picked up in college. Inspired by his brother, who is a computer science major at NC State University, Mertz also recently began taking web development classes. He has made his own accessible website and also created a game using JavaScript. Computer science is an exciting challenge for Mertz. “I’m still not super far on that track, but it is something I’m ultimately interested in,” Mertz said. Mertz noted that he has always been a good math student, but was not inspired until high school.
“It was always something I was pretty good at. Even so, I never got into the program where you jump ahead a grade in math. The placement test for that was in elementary school and I think I was one question off from being placed in there, which was kind of discouraging,” Mertz said. Even though he was always in advanced classes, Mertz didn’t truly appreciate math until his senior year, when he says he had an outstanding teacher. “My 12th grade math teacher taught me both calculus and statistics and he was absolutely incredible and made math really interesting. He made me want to be a teacher,” Mertz said. Mertz went on to attend University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, getting his B. S. in mathematics in 2019 as well as his teaching license. After teaching for a year at Jordan High School in Durham, Mertz wants to go to graduate school at North Carolina State University to study Operations Research and hopes to move on to some kind of applied work involving that. Still, Mertz has had his ups and downs with math. He revealed that the most difficult class he’s ever taken is called Real Analysis, which is actually similar to some of the curriculum that math students are learning here. “It’s a class where you go back and ask more of the fundamental questions that you never really think to ask along the way. Actually having to sit down and rigorously prove everything that you know is true is a very difficult sort of thing,” Mertz said. So many of his classmates ended up dropping out of the program that the professor offered extra points, with a minimum grade of a C+, just for making it to the end of the course. “Even on that scale, I only made B-,” Mertz joked. Mertz notes that Governor’s School classes are similarly challenging. “I think Governor’s School has a real magic to it. I think Governor’s School is much like that real analysis class that I took. It was the point where I really started questioning my fundamental beliefs.” Governor’s School was able to help Mertz change as a person and establish all of the things that he really believes in, rather than accepting the things he’s grown up with without question. “I feel like Governor's School planted those seeds. I feel like those seeds didn’t quite sprout until maybe five-ish years later, but I still have Governor's School to thank for it, and it was around that time that those seeds were sprouting that I ended up coming back as a TAC,” Mertz said. Mertz is extremely devoted to his TAC duties between attending Area I math classes, going to meetings between classes, engaging with students on the quad, supporting fellow staff members at their electives, and even transporting injured students to Urgent Care. “There’s no real time off except for very scheduled time off. But you never really turn off as a TAC; you’re always doing something, or always can be doing something,” Mertz said.
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