Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Welcome to the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
With support from AMS membership, we are pleased to share the journal with the global mathematical community.
PDFLINK |
Be Open to Unexpected Opportunities: Work-Life Balance Requires Creativity, But it is Worth the Effort
From a very early age I had a plan: I was going to get a PhD in math. What I would do after that was always an open question. I have an eclectic set of interests, but the thread of mathematics weaves most of them together. In undergrad, I found algebra to be a natural framework for my approach to math, and its overlap with number theory connected my interests in linguistics and cryptology. My first deviation from the plan was a foray into analysis in my second year of graduate school. This led me, at the beginning of my third year, to knock on the door of the professor who was to be my advisor and ask her to do an independent study with me to explore possible research topics. Enter the study of lattice point counting through the lens of harmonic analysis and fractal geometry. Then came my second deviation from the plan: my son. Four years and a global pandemic later, I successfully defended my dissertation (virtually, while my husband took our son to the park—thank goodness for good weather!).
The key to my success was the support of my family, my department, and—most of all—my advisor. She was determined for me, not just to graduate, but to find a meaningful career afterwards (be that in academia or industry). The funny part being that I’m currently on the “industry path” but working at an academic institute based at my alma mater.
Let me back up a little in this story…
I read forums suggesting that grad school was the best time to have kids because you will never have as much time in an academic career until it’s far too late. I can’t speak to how well that holds, but I’ll make a supporting argument for the case if you don’t go the academic route, with one caveat: after candidacy.
Flexibility is key. In many ways I was lucky, my son was born at the beginning of a semester and I earned a fellowship so I wouldn’t have to teach. This gave me the flexibility to plan my semester of research in a way that worked for us. I spent much of that semester (once I started itching to get back to math—my cousin was right that staying engaged in research is best) reading papers with my son asleep in my lap, allowing me to feel like both a good mama and a good math researcher. This habit extended far past any maternal leave of which I’m aware (at least in the US), and I even got in the habit of working out loud when he was awake (how many six-month-olds get to learn about Fourier decay?). The flexibility of my schedule even after my fellowship ended allowed me much more quality time with my son in his early years—something for which I am eternally grateful. Having a baby in grad school definitely isn’t easy, and probably leads to much more working at odd hours and the sense of a need to constantly be on, but some of that is just being a parent, and the quality of that time cannot be overstated, though—barring a pandemic—day care is probably a good idea at some point.
Despite the challenges of everything going online in 2020, there were many doors opened; it became feasible to attend seminars around the country and abroad, collaborate with others half a world away, even asynchronously. Unfortunately, this meant often working when my son was asleep, which did not bode well for my sleep.
Believing I could do everything, I rejected the idea of time for myself meaning anything other than work, but I digress…
When my 2020 conference schedule was postponed, I made another pivot. It was time to answer that long-open question of what I would do for a career after getting my degree, and the industry-curious side had the more persuasive argument. I had done an internship in topological data analysis (TDA) in the summer following my candidacy, so I signed up for the (now online) data science bootcamp offered by the Erdős Institute, channeling my COVID anxiety into a machine learning (ML) problem of predicting (or comparing) COVID spread across the country using publicly available data on county case numbers and demographics. I completed the program again the following year and used TDA to analyze football plays, though I knew next-to-nothing about football. Sometimes lack of preconceptions can be an asset.
Don’t be afraid to seek out these opportunities. Grad school is a time to explore opportunities and learn as much as possible—you never know what may inspire your next approach. Certainly, taking a break to chew on another problem can help unstick your brain (many of my best dissertation writing marathons came after a coding session or working through an ML problem). There is a lot of power in positive affirmations, and this is a good one, courtesy of one of my computer science colleagues: “You’re a mathematician, that means you can do anything.”
Mathematics is far more versatile than what we are often led to believe—we’ve all been in a class where someone asks “when am I going to use this?” Even the moniker of “Pure Mathematics,” as in, a subject whose only impact is on itself, disguises the breadth and broad applicability of this domain. This common misconception is one of the greatest disservices to our field. I got my current position based on data science programs I pursued outside of my main research area, yet I can still find connections. After telling one of the graduate students I’ve been working with (a biologist) about my dissertation topic, he shared some papers on butterflies’ wing patterns and the mathematics that describes them—yet another connection to lattice points.
Don’t be self-limiting. More and more research involves overlap of various fields, be they within or exterior to mathematics. I currently work in the field of imageomics, which utilizes ML techniques (in particular, computer vision) to answer questions in biology by analyzing images. Though it is not directly mathematical, analyses of embedding spaces to understand the structure and pattern of big data are based in mathematical concepts (from topology to group theory). Even when it is not directly applicable to the problem at hand, there is a method of thinking—the techniques that we learn—which informs our approach to any problem, not just those that are clearly mathematical in nature. Harness that, celebrate it.
During my interview for my current position, I was asked about an experience where I had to balance competing interests and how I handled it. Now, full disclosure, by the time I was asked this I had assumed I was not getting this position. They had asked about experience with a bunch of programs I had not used (which, had they been listed in the job description, would have kept me from applying—there’s a lesson on self-selecting here).Footnote1 That assumption released me from the big fear: As a woman, I know mentioning family can be the kiss of death in an industry setting, but—let’s be honest—the greatest competing interest, completely unavoidable, is family. It’s persistent, incessant, and unavoidable, so what better than motherhood to teach one to balance competing interests? Which brings me to my answer:
I’ve since learned the ones that have come up (plus others that weren’t mentioned) and I have a team to work with, so it’s not all on my shoulders.
Spring 2020, the world shut down, and suddenly we were all home, all the time: my husband, my toddler, and myself. I had research, I had students, I had my family, some days I had life flights (emergency helicopters) flying overhead every hour.
I had to balance the competing interests of my child who wanted my attention—constantly—who was no longer really napping, who was supposed to be starting day care. I had to find time for him, for the students, for my research, and I had to coordinate on Zoom with my advisor, holding papers up to my camera where we would otherwise have been writing together on a chalkboard or side-by-side. Balance had to be achieved. I felt responsibility for my students, but I couldn’t put the same care into correcting their proofs writing with a trackpad and keep making progress on my research and be available for my son and sleep. Instead, I compartmentalized: I wrote out detailed solutions for my students, offering explanations to common mistakes at the bottom to reduce the time spent writing out information on their individual assignments. I set aside designated days for my research, often passing my scrap paper or papers I had read to my son to “make Mommy’s work look pretty” with his crayons.
Don’t underestimate the value of scheduling. Balance doesn’t come easy, and there are definitely times when it’s simpler to work on one project over another, but time is precious, so I binned my tasks. More precisely, I grouped different tasks that were similar to have a selection of tasks to choose from at a particular time that I had reserved for those types of tasks. For instance, writing time vs research time vs grading, etc. It’s amazing how inspiration can strike while typing up a proof with a two-year-old sitting on a stool next to you with his “woo-woo [work] machine”Footnote2 working while Daniel Tiger music is playing in the background.
“Woo-woo machine” is what my son called a little folding screen cleaner that he would set up like a little laptop to work with me.
Having balance between your work-life and home-life doesn’t always take the form of separate time for each. When my son was just a newborn, I found tasks that I could do with him (like reading papers), so that we could be together. Now he’s in school, but my husband and I both work from home, so we can take a break and go for a walk together between meetings—just the two of us, or as a family when our son gets home from school. Squeezing in this time during the day brings us all closer together, and is certainly healthier than sitting at a desk nonstop. Work-life balance is not something of which I’d claim mastery, but I have learned that giving myself that space and time allows me to be more present, both at work and at home.
Elizabeth’s son, working with Mama
Credits
Photo of Elizabeth’s son provided by and © Elizabeth G. Campolongo.