"Anyone who thinks the only point of the subject is to find their perfect boyfriend or job or lucky day or what have you is a moron," Z said dismissively. "Sure, you can get some indication of those things but it's more complicated than that and honestly, that requires no imagination or finesse."
Z was pleased that Professor Nolan seemed to understand where she was coming from and not only respect the subject, but also have real affection for it. Nolan reminded her a bit of Wilford Danson, the Arithmancer she'd been working with in LA right through last summer.
"I suppose my main interests are the intersection of Runic magic and Arithmancy. I like developing new spells and altering existing ones." Z smiled wryly. "I'm yet another person poking about, wanting to know why and how magic works and what I can do with it outside of spell books. I'm a bit obsessed with patterns used in older runic magic-how to combine those with modern Arithmatical theory and equations to create something new or more powerful."
Given that Nolan had alluded towards the potential to create darker spells-and wasn't that interesting? Z decided that she was willing to make her own ambitions plain. Assuming he didn't read any Dark megalomaniacal tendencies into her genuine academic curiosity and report her to the Ministry, maybe she'd stop getting busy work in her NEWT class.
"I'm not interested in making another Lumos, I want to make Lumos and torches obsolete by developing an entirely new of lighting the magical world. Well, actually, no. I like muggle eclectricity and those cool glass balls with captured sunlight-you know, the ones that French architect-wizard came up with? So I don't actually want to do stuff with light, that's just an example of the scale I want to work on."