Notices of the American Mathematical Society
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A Teaching Mathematician: The Immigrant Experience
I grew up in a 600 sq ft 2-bedroom apartment in suburban Mumbai, India. I lived with my parents and shared a room with my sister until my 26th birthday. I am very sentimental by nature and value my friendships deeply, finding it difficult to let go of memories and the physical objects associated with them. Some may say I am a hoarder of memorabilia—I have saved notes passed between friends in my sixth-grade class, notebooks from high school with any praise from my teachers, old letters, cards, ticket stubs, and threadbare t-shirts and brochures from college events. I found spots to save these things in our tiny home, away from the eyes of my mother who maintained our shared space meticulously to be devoid of any clutter. I used storage compartments under my bed and the space between the tops of cupboards and the ceiling to tightly pack away my ever-growing stockpile of memories. The locked compartment in the desk that I shared with my sister held all my journals from 1999.
On my very first international flight to start graduate school in America, my ticket said I could bring 2 suitcases, 50 pounds each. A hundred pounds may seem like a lot, but it fills up fast for an international student. Our luggage starter pack includes a pressure cooker (packed lid and pot separately in 2 suitcases so as to not invite suspicion), rice, lentils, and spices (out of fear of not being able to find these things), warm clothes and light clothes (to prepare for every possible weather), traditional clothes (for holidays), Western formal clothes and casual clothes (unsure about the dress code) important documents that include every piece of paper with your name on it starting with your birth (terrified you’ll need something that you left behind and be deported as a result). There wasn’t much room left in the suitcases for my sentiments. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to choose which of my memories were important enough to bring with me to my life on the other side of the world.
My last two years living in India were spent teaching as a lecturer at three different colleges. There was an unwritten dress code for female faculty at all educational institutions in India, born out of the patriarchal narrative of young men in the classroom being distracted by seeing their women educators as sexual objects. The only acceptable attire included sarees and salwar kameezes (long knee-length tunics worn with loose pants and a shawl over your shoulders and chest). Western formals like long pencil skirts and trousers were begrudgingly allowed to be donned by Christian women, and you could only wear jeans to work on Saturdays (with long shirts, of course), when there were no students around. I was once given a stern talk by three different senior members of the faculty for showing up to sign some papers on my day off wearing an innocuous knee-length skirt and t-shirt. As someone who was conditioned to reject skirts and pants as appropriate teaching attire, I found myself in a huge dilemma while shopping for my move to the US—I wanted to be appropriately dressed for my job, but I also shied away from packing my Indian clothes as I did not want to be stereotyped by students and colleagues as someone who was clearly “not from here.” I was hoping to blend in as much as possible. I purchased many formal skirts, trousers, blouses, and blazers, only to realize after moving to Michigan that the default graduate school dress code in mathematics was jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers. During my first semester of graduate school, my new friends lovingly teased me for always looking like I was going to a business meeting.
The truth was that my overly formal attire was a literal and figurative mask to cover up just how nervous I was about being a teaching assistant to American college students. I come from a culture with a love/hate relationship for Western, white culture. India is still a huge market for fairness creams, and lighter skin is more valued even beyond the context of beauty. While we claim to have moral superiority over Westerners with our traditional values, we are in awe of them for being the developed world, grudgingly admitting that they know better than us in matters of education and industrial progress. In my early years of graduate school, I was hugely deferential towards those who hired me. I found it hard to digest that they could trust me, an immigrant woman of color from a third-world country, with educating their young minds. Thanks to my intense impostor syndrome, I was convinced for years that my admission into graduate school was a clerical mistake (one that I was eternally grateful for). I was determined to prove that I was a worthy hire. It didn’t help that I could sense the distrust of my students when I relayed stories from my time teaching in India, and when I used mathematical terms foreign to them (like “a upon b” to denote a fraction instead of “a over b,” and “a into b” for multiplication instead of “a times b”). Their skepticism was confirmed in their many complaints about my harsh grading and difficult-to-understand accent in my end-of-semester evaluations.
Diwali 2014, my first one away from home, was one of the hardest days of that initial semester. In India all offices and schools are closed for a week. The entire months of October and November are filled with festivities that include visiting family and friends, lots of great food, and fireworks. I could not wrap my head around the fact that I was working on Diwali, and that the current world around me was oblivious to the fact that this was the biggest day of the year. For an American, it would be like working in a part of the world that did not acknowledge Thanksgiving, and made you work through the entire weekend! In a small attempt to make myself feel better, I wore my green Kantha (a style of embroidery from West Bengal) silk saree to campus, an outfit I was saving for an evening celebration with friends. I looked ridiculously overdressed in terms of ostentatiousness, and comically underdressed in terms of the Michigan winter, but on this day I did not care. The six yards of traditional fabric wrapped around me like a protective hug from the intense homesickness I felt that day. Still, there was a tiny part of me that worried about what everyone would think of my ensemble. To my surprise, there were a lot of compliments and questions, which gave me an opportunity to share my culture with colleagues, students, and complete strangers on the bus.
By the summer of 2015, I grew more confident in my teaching and my ability to relate to students in the United States. Not only was I becoming more integrated into the academic culture in this country, I was able to recognize that the anxieties of students regarding mathematics were universal, and that my capacity for empathy and patience toward students, which was fueled by my own impostor syndrome, was a tremendous strength. At the same time, I grew increasingly bored of the beige, gray, and blue pieces of my Western wardrobe and found myself missing my colorful Indian clothes. Unable to afford a ticket to India during that first summer, I requested my parents to ship me some of my books and clothes from back home. My mother sent me 30 of my beloved cotton sarees that I wore to work as a teacher in India. In my second year as a graduate teaching assistant, I slowly started integrating these into my wardrobe. I was careful not to wear them on the days I was teaching, still nervous about being perceived as a fresh-off-the-boat Indian by my students. Occasionally I would run into students in the hallways who would smile and compliment my outfit, which always took me by pleasant surprise.
By the fall of 2016, I had established myself as a graduate student who was solely interested in a teaching career, and as such I was assigned to teach classes as the instructor of record. I sought out a variety of courses to teach, including college algebra, calculus, and introduction to proofs. My teaching mentors at Michigan State University offered me a position as a lead teaching assistant, which meant I would be mentoring several younger teaching assistants by conducting peer observations and having conversations about teaching practices. I served on many graduate student panels discussing a wide range of topics, including interests in teaching careers and student support, and cultivating inclusive classrooms. All of this and the encouragement from my peers and mentors was starting to convince me that I was in fact worthy of being an educator in one of the most developed countries in the world. This was reflected in my outfit choices, as I now routinely draped my beloved sarees to teach a class. Some Midwestern students were fascinated by my clothes and culture and asked a lot of polite questions, which I was happy to answer. I had nurtured a friendly and comfortable relationship with my students in every class I taught, albeit only after the first half of the semester. For this reason, I had a stupid rule for myself—I would only wear traditional Indian clothes after the first month of the semester, i.e., once I believed I had earned the trust of my students. When they believed I was actually good at my job and not just an immigrant woman with an unpronounceable name who did not herself go through the American education system, I could relax and be a little more myself.
After six years of battling with my intense impostor syndrome with research, I finally graduated with my PhD in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020. While I was never convinced that my research in degenerate elliptic equations amounted to anything meaningful, my years of hard work and dedication pursuing a teaching career finally bore fruit when I earned myself a teaching postdoctoral position at Harvard University starting in fall 2020. Navigating online teaching during the pandemic while also adjusting to a new job and city was an exceedingly challenging task, but I learned an incredible amount during that first year at Harvard. I was continuously impressed by the students who were more brilliant, humble, and hardworking than any I had ever met. Moreover, I found myself at a job where my compassion for students was deeply valued, and any doubts I had about myself as an educator were slowly melting away. I was finally growing more secure in my role in my students’ lives. Fall 2022 was the first semester where I broke my one-month rule and wore a saree on my first day of class, a new tradition I intend to follow for the rest of my career.
As a confident early career mathematician who is slowly recovering from her impostor syndrome, I can only offer this advice to new graduate students (especially international students): unapologetically be yourself. Bring your culture, food, and clothing to this country along with your curiosity. Taking space for your diverse self will only serve to enrich the community at your institution and enhance the educational experience of your students. As educators of young adult minds, I firmly believe that we have a responsibility toward our students that goes beyond our respective disciplines. We are also assigned to teach them to be compassionate human beings toward all members of our society. To create inclusive spaces in our classrooms and departments, we need everyone, especially those from marginalized communities, to be safe in their self-expression. Bring your authentic self to work every day, and you will give permission to those who look up to you to do the same.
I am now fortunate to be working at my ultimate dream job, as an assistant teaching professor at the University of California, Merced, where my students continue to inspire me to grow as an educator each passing day. The one hundred pounds I snugly packed into two suitcases a decade ago have slowly but steadily multiplied to fill up a home three times the size of the one I grew up in. As I think back to the terrified young woman who immigrated across the planet a decade ago, I can’t help but wish that I had a time machine to go back to her and tell her that she shouldn’t be so worried about the space restrictions—her life will expand to accommodate a new village, many memories, and hundreds of colorful sarees.
Reshma Menon is an assistant teaching professor at the University of California, Merced. Her email address is menon@ucmerced.edu.
Article DOI: 10.1090/noti3057
Credits
Photo of Reshma Menon is courtesy of Reshma Menon.