 panel. So the purpose of this panel is to give you an idea of various career arcs that you can have in academia. Many people know that there's a traditional grad school postdoc professor but there are many many options in many ways through that. They don't all go that straight path and hopefully our panelists will give you a broad spectrum. We're focused on academic careers in the United States mainly because most of you are going to be looking for jobs in the US. That doesn't mean we're trying to exclude other places in other countries. It's just that that's the major interest and in other countries there are many things that are very specific to them. What I will strongly encourage you is from the very first moment to start thinking of your questions and there will be people around the audience who will help you with a microphone when you have a question. So please wait till you have the microphone to ask your question. We'll start with very very brief introductions. I'm Brian Akram. I'm on the steering committee here. I did not have a straight path through academia. I started as a grad student at Stanford so maybe pretty standard. Then I had six years of postdocs in many different institutions including in Israel, in France, University of Michigan, Ohio State University. I then had a ten-year track job at Penn State University. Then I tenured there and moved to Northwestern University. So I have tried to do all the big ten. I didn't quite manage only four of them. I don't know if I recommend this as a career path but it certainly is one way to make things happen. I've had many other jobs both here on the steering committee in the American Math Society and chair of my department, chair of every committee in the department, and many other such things. Now let me turn it over to Diane. Hi. I'm Diane Holcomb and I did my graduate studies at University of Wisconsin specializing in random matrices. After University of Wisconsin, I graduated and moved to University of Arizona and I spent three years there as a postdoc and I am off to KTH next year for another postdoc. Hi. My name is Faraz Rasubaga. I did my undergrads in Paris, Econormal, and then I did my graduate studies at NYU, Koran Institute, then did a postdoc at Ohio State, then went on to Utah, some local, and did assistant associate now full professor. I'm Erica Walker. I am professor of mathematics education at Teachers College at Columbia University. My undergraduate degrees are in mathematics and with a Spanish minor. I was a high school teacher for a couple of years. I have a master's degree in mathematics education from Wake Forest University. After teaching for a couple of years, I decided to go get my doctorate and my plan was to get an educational administration because I thought I could be a better principal than this principal I'm working under as a high school teacher. Once I got to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which is where my doctorate is from, I got bitten by the research bug and I completed a dissertation on looking at advanced mathematics course taking patterns among students in the U.S. in high school. After completing my dissertation, which used survival analysis and other longitudinal data analysis techniques, I did a postdoc at Teachers College. It was supposed to be a one-year postdoc. I thought I'll live in New York for a year, then I'll go back to the south where I'm from. As you heard from my first statement, I'm still at Teachers College. Let's just say many years later. I got tenure at Teachers College. I went through from postdoc to assistant professor to associate professor. I'm a full professor now. They're at Teachers College. Hi. My name is Irena Swanson. I'm also on the steering committee here. I got my Ph.D. at Purdue University. My postdoc was at University of Michigan. Then I was at New Mexico State University for 10 years. I got my tenure there. I was an associate professor in those 10 years. I spent a year and a half at MSRI and a year in a special research opportunity in Kansas. Then I moved and I'm tenured at Reed College, my alma mater. I should also say I had a two-body problem. My husband also has a Ph.D. in mathematics, but jobs in the early 1990s are not so easy to come by. He was more employable in the industry, so he has been programming. Well, that was his path. Hey, I'm Henry Saganman. I'm an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. I don't do random matrices. I do 3D geometry and topology. I also do mathematical visualization, which is a little bit different, less traditional. I did my undergrad at Oxford University and then Ph.D. at Stanford University. Then I did a postdoc at UT Austin and another postdoc at University of Melbourne before, and I've now been at Oklahoma State for four years. Hi, I'm Ivan Corwin. I did my undergrad at Harvard in math. I got a little disillusioned by how algebraic everything was, so I worked in finance for a year after that. Came back, did my Ph.D. at NYU. I was there for a few years and then traveled for a year, spent time at MSRI, and then did a postdoc one year at Microsoft Research, two years at MIT, and then came to Columbia, I guess, with tenure, and two days from now I get full. Okay, so before I open it up to questions from everybody, I'm going to pose one question to this panel to get you guys started. Since Ivan's holding the microphone, he's going to be put on the spot first. I want you to look back at any point in this career arc that you've had with whatever decisions you made, one piece of advice you wish you had heard. It could be as an undergrad, even high school, grad student, postdoc, assistant professor, or as coming up for full professor. I think the best advice that maybe I was given was that if you want to really be a hard researcher to try to emphasize working on that for as long as possible, not getting yourself carried away with too many other responsibilities too early. Maybe you might have an opportunity to get an assistant professorship early, right out of grad school or soon, but take your time, focus on your research, build that up, because eventually you're not going to have much time to work on it, and you want to have as much as under your belt as you can. I guess this is sort of a similar kind of thing about if you want to do research, get started early. I never did any undergraduate research, and I felt that it would have been helpful if I had. I just started as a grad student doing research then, and I might have found out that it wasn't something that I actually wanted to do. It turned out it was okay, and I did like it. I would say if you have opportunities to do undergraduate research and you're an undergraduate, you should take them. One piece of advice is that talk to others. Even if you don't quite speak their language, even if your research areas are not the same, it's a very good idea to develop these bridging opportunities, bridging vocabularies. You'll get so much more out of colloquia. You'll be able to write your papers in so much broader areas, and don't be afraid of saying, I don't know, and then ask that person who seems to know something. Ask them, ask them, ask them until you understand. A piece of advice that I didn't get but that I inadvertently followed was to do a postdoc after getting my doctoral degree. I think getting a postdoc affords you some time to recover from the dissertation process in your graduate school experience, but it also helps give you a head start on your research and just sort of acclimating to institutions, particularly if you're switching from a smaller institution to a larger institution. These kinds of acclimation experiences are very important. Okay, so back when I was at NYU, well, the first couple of years, I did well in the coursework and so on, but it was about time to choose a field, a research field to work on, and I had really no idea. I liked what I was doing, but I had no idea. So I went around and talked to professors to see if they can give me advice on how to pick my research topic. So the advice that I ended up following came actually from Percy Deist. So thank you. It was very good advice. So the advice was go back tonight and think about what courses you took that you enjoyed, not just you got A's and them, because you're going to do this for the rest of your life. And so I went back and decided probability theory was the thing that I enjoyed most, and now I'm a probabilist. So that's one thing also, starting research early, but also pick something that you're going to enjoy, because there are going to be lots of down times when you have no idea of how to solve the problem you're working on, and these could be really bad times sometimes. And so you want to be enjoying what you're doing. I have so many pieces of advice I would wish I had gotten, but since I'm going to pick one, the one I would say is really go to conferences, and when you go to conferences, make friends with the people that are in your cohort. So everyone at conferences, I feel like you want to talk to the big names and make sure people know you, but the people who have helped me the most, the people who I think I've learned the most from are my peers. Maybe there's someone you're going to do a project with down the line, maybe there's someone that's just going to give you that piece of advice when something doesn't go exactly how you expect in your PhD or your postdoc or something like this, but those people, they're the ones you can really talk to about what's going right, what's going wrong, and maybe even learn a lot of math from. So that would be my advice. I'm going to amplify on what Diane said, is I think everybody in this room should think tonight about who are their mentors, and the mentor might be your advisor, and it might be a peer, and it might be somebody who's not at your university, but you might need different mentors for different things. And so you should think about that and have a cohort of people that you're comfortable asking questions of. Okay, so now, with that first bit of advice, now is your opportunity. It's for you guys to ask questions. I'm not going to ask all the questions. And so there's a microphone coming around. I see one right here. Please wait till you have the microphone before asking your question, and it's helpful if somebody else raises their hand in advance, you'll get the next question. You're welcome to direct your question to one person on the panel, a group of people on the panel, or a panel in general. Go ahead. At what point did you transition from mostly following the lead of others' work to defining your own research priorities and feeling that you had creative agency, and how did you know that you had reached that point? Okay, great question on the transition from being a follower student to being an independent researcher. There are all stages on this stage of these things. Henry. So for me, I think it was some point during grad school. When I realized that my advisor's interests and my interests were not quite the same, and the kind of things that I was interested in and in doing were just a little bit different from the kinds of things that he was doing, and, well, and things started to work, and my advisor was surprised and happy about this, which is good, because it wasn't sort of the direction that he might have thought about. So yeah, I mean, presumably this happens all over the place, but for me it was then in sort of beginning to realize what is the thing that I'm actually good at that I'm better than all of these other incredibly clever people who are around, and what can I try and focus on to make a difference, to produce work that people haven't seen or done before? So for me, it was probably my first semester at MSRI, that's a Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. It was a special program, and it was in commutative algebra or computational aspects of it, so it was a little bit outside of my area, but that's where I felt that I was talking to these people who are not exactly in my research area, but I had things to contribute, and so that's where I felt independent. So I think it's important to know in advance that it's not always a simple transition. There can be a lot of growing pains and going from being a follower to a leader. If you're lucky, when you're younger, you'll have good mentors and you'll maybe have some problems that you're given and you'll work with them and you'll build something. It's tough to go from being fed ideas and questions and problems to producing, because no one's gonna tell you, is this a good idea? Is this something that is gonna take you far? Is this an approach that's gonna work? So it can be a little rough adjusting, but you just need to accept that, and somewhere I'd say in your postdoc is a good time to make that transition. Stop working with as many people older than you and start to work with people your same age or maybe even some grad students, but it's a case-by-case thing, I guess. Let me ask a show of hands for people on the panel. Your first problem, any type of research, did it come from your advisor? Yes, hands up if yes, if it came from your advisor. And of those who's semi, okay, half up. Of those whose first problem did, or half up, did your second problem that you worked on come from your advisor? Okay? How about the most recent problem you've worked on? There's the transition, it happens at some point. For many people it's late, for many people it's early, or it comes from somewhere, right? It doesn't have to. Okay, more questions from the audience. I see one out there, it would be helpful if we know that the next ones are coming from as well. Rafe, can you get the one in the middle? So please put your hands up if you have questions. From when you started your graduate studies to now, how did your definition of sort of what a goal was and how did the goals that you had for your career change over time? Hey, good question. Who wants to tackle that one first? Do you mean to the goal as in a career goal? Well, I mean, quite often the goal is, can I get another job when this one finishes? That's a pretty good goal. Well, and then, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure I have a good answer with this. Like, well, at first it was, well, I should do a post-doc. You put out however many applications and managed to get a post-doc, right? It was a pretty good one. And then, actually, there was a transition. My second post-doc, I actually found out really late in the process. My first post-doc was basically over. I'd had a couple of interviews of liberal arts colleges that I hadn't gone through and I thought, is that it? And then the second post-doc came through and that was fantastic. And then, for me, it was then, okay, two post-docs down, surely, two, three year post-docs, I should be getting a permanent position. I don't want to be just doing post-docs the rest of my life. It would be good to get a permanent position. I actually applied one year before I had to. So in the second year of my post-doc, I applied for positions and got one and got the position I'm in now that I deferred for another year. So, right, get a job, get a permanent job. I guess that was my sequence of goals. Keep doing what I'm doing because I'm enjoying it. Okay, other people on the panel? Irina, Erika, comment on goals? So, I went to graduate school because I wanted to teach college. I always liked my teachers. In first grade, I thought I wanted to be a first grade teacher and then it went like that. And when I got to graduate school, I said, oh, actually I like research. So, my goal changed in graduate school. And then in my post-doc years, I never want to move again. I just want to go sit somewhere and get a permanent job. But then when I got my tenure-track job in New Mexico State, it's like every other year we moved. Our son lived in 13 different houses by the time he was in seventh grade. I was like, yes, let's go there, let's go there. Now I'm more sedentary again. I want to stay in one place. But as research-wise, there was a period when I had this pile of problem and I thought, okay, when I just finished this pile of problems, but then every time you finish a few of those problems, then the set of your pile increases with new problems. So, I guess I'm getting more realistic that, yes, I have a few problems I'd like to solve, but maybe I won't. I do think that sometimes your goals change in graduate school. So, as I mentioned, I thought I was going to be a high school principal, which still would be a great job and I think I'd be very good at it. But when you're open to new things and experiencing new ideas, sometimes your priorities shift. And I think it's a good idea to always be open to that. So even once I decided to go into educational research, I knew I wanted to be a professor, but even my sort of research goals shifted over time. Because you're exposed to new ideas from different faculty, from your students, and so the areas where I started my research in are now, they're related, but they're different than what I expected. And I think they're good, but there was a definite shift. So I think it's good to have a plan. You should always have a plan, but you should also be open to opportunities as they present themselves. New ideas, new areas of research, and to continue along that way. Do you hear us? Yeah, I guess the goals evolve with you. At the beginning, my goal was just to get through the next exam. But then, well now, for example, my goals, well, research-wise, I have a few problems, too many maybe, I'm working on. Well, if I could get any one of them, I'd be happy, and then look towards the next one, and so on. But also, there's the department that I'm part of, and then there are goals to improve the group, to serve the department, and so on. And there's also balanced family, and so I don't know exactly if you're asking about a goal academically or in life. A lot of goals, and I'll be happy to get any one of them. Okay, so we've had a lot of questions about research, ARC. There are many other aspects of a career that you might want to think about, asking questions of how to apply for particular types of jobs, what you should be doing now to prepare for that. There have been several people who brought up balancing family and career. It's been hidden in many of the comments for many of the people, okay? So I open up to the next question. Do you guys rave in the back there, and then next it's gonna be up here. Keep your hand waving, the person in the back. Yep, right there. Well, so listening from your stories, I know it's quite common for people in academia to just move around all the time. So how do you juggle with this constant change of environment and constant change of places? Because sometimes even in the United States you might be moving around, but sometimes you might even be moving to different countries and different cultures. So Dan, we might put you on the spot as somebody in the middle of such a move, yeah? It's hard, I mean, that's the short answer. It depends a little bit on your family situation. It depends on your academic situation. For a lot of people, I know postdocs are really lonely because you move there and you don't really know anybody and there's usually not that many postdocs around. It can help if there's a lot of postdocs, but you don't really meet the grad students, right? It's not like grad school where you go and you have classes and you do homework together and all this stuff, like you just are there and you're sort of in your own little bubble doing your own little thing and you go a little crazy. So I would very much encourage you to make sure you take the time to put down some roots wherever you move. I think it's really easy when you take these temporary jobs to just be like, well, it's just not worth, I don't know, finding this group that does this activity or into maybe at some sort of sports like Ultimate Frisbee or maybe it's music or maybe it's learning a language or whatever, like find those things and do them. It's really important. And the other thing is that it's a mixed bag, I feel like, if you move with your family or you move without. Like if you have a family and you're all moving together, that's hard because you're coordinating careers, you're trying to deal with maybe moving kids, but if you're moving alone, that's harder in a different way because you move and you don't know anybody. So I would say recognize that this is gonna be how it is and if it's gonna be hard for you, think about setting an upper bound on how many times you're willing to do it because there are people who will just keep going and going and do more and more post-docs and that can be really, really hard. So I would just throw that out there as a heads up. So I think there are other comments, Henry, you wanted to say something? I saw you. I think while Henry's getting ready, there are many different ways through this and it's gonna be a very personal choice and there's no wrong way. Yeah, so there's sort of, I think, two main downsides to the life of an academic. One is grading and the other is that you don't necessarily get to choose where you live or where you're gonna be for the next two or three years and yeah, it sucks. I'll just reiterate how something else that you do. So I'm a juggler and there's usually, if you're in a big town, there's a juggling group that meets every week and then you've got a ready-made community you can just sort of slot into and do something with other people and that's important. Another situation which I was in when I was in my postdoc is kind of a long distance commuting and that people do this and it can be very tiring. So when entering into postdocs or positions, you need to be careful about just how thin you're gonna spread your time and just how much you're willing to be in one place versus multiple places. It's also the same as true with travel. As an academic, there's the potential to go to conferences for half of the year and this can be very beneficial for you but if you are in a position where you're gonna be moving every few years, you need to be careful again not to travel too, too much because you only have so much potential for doing that sort of stuff. And once you've seen, I mean, depending on how big your research area is, if you've been to three conferences this year, you've probably seen everybody's talks anyway. You don't really need to go to the other two conferences to see the same people say the same things. Yeah, I have also, you'll find that most people on the panel have at some point had to deal with juggling two-body problems or most people in academia. Not necessarily academic, I did four years of commuting and perseverance made it pay off that we ended up with jobs in the same city. It is helpful in getting individual advice on this from somebody and so I think it's really helpful to have one of your people in your mentor group who you can turn to for advice on that, separate from research, but it's a big issue. Anybody? I just wanted to comment one brief thing. So for me it was easy to move around because I had a permanent job in New Mexico State. So once you're settled, a move is so much easier than when you have to move and then you don't know when you'll be two or three years after that. So it's necessary to move earlier in your career before you have a permanent job but it's so much easier to do it later. And also my husband is a little more flexible. He can work long distance so sometimes he would come once a month for 10 days or sometimes he actually moved with us. Should we move on to the next question? I think it's up here. For those of you who took time between undergrad and grad school, how did you handle the transition back to grad school and do you have any experiences you regret or are thankful for from that? First of all, I thought that for me, taking time out of graduating undergrad was an excellent decision. You work really hard, you kind of head down through undergrad and I saw people when I was already in grad school who kind of kept going and came into grad school and then they kind of looked up and they realized I'm gonna be here for four and a half years what the hell am I doing? And because they hadn't thought about what it is they really wanna do and it's hard to do that when you're an undergrad. So taking a year I think is a great option in trying something maybe in your area, maybe not, maybe something totally different. I was scared when I started up again. I felt like I had a year out, I couldn't remember half of the math that I thought I had learned. And I thought when I was coming to grad school that okay, this isn't gonna work. And like anything, you just adjust back to it. So you need to give yourself some time, you need to, it also helps because you have in a sense a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. You feel like you're coming from behind because you've been out a little. And I actually think having a chip on your shoulder is generally a helpful thing in academia in the sense that you always wanna feel like you're coming from behind because it makes you work harder. So I would encourage considering something like that. Erica, do you wanna comment? It's hard to say because I graduated from college and immediately drove to this master's program in Wake Forest which was a teacher preparation program. So I feel like everything was just sort of very seamless for me in terms of my adjustment. So when I started graduate school at Harvard, I've always loved school and loved learning. So I was just thrilled to be there and happy to be back in that environment. So I don't feel that I ever really left school really and I guess in a way I didn't. Anyone in the audience who took a year off who wants to make a comment, took some time out, did something non-traditional. Not trying to put anyone on the spot but I do see someone back there and we could get a mic to have a comment. And then while he's preparing, anyone get a next question ready in the audience? Can I see any hands? Okay. Yeah, I took four years in between undergrad and doing a PhD. I did a master's degree in a totally unrelated subject and then I had a series of jobs. I was a software engineer for a little while. I was a freelance writer. I worked in finance for a bit. And then after kind of feeling like I couldn't get away from math. I was still trying to read math a lot in my free time. I figured that maybe I should just actually go to grad school. And I had a similar experience to what I've been described being, I remember two years ago, trying to work back through baby Rudin and trying to figure out how to take a limit again which I couldn't remember. Learning about the root test and the ratio test and convergence of sequences. And I do really agree that, one, having the chip on my shoulder kind of helped as a source of motivation. But also, I think that taking time off was a really good idea just because it's completely changed my orientation towards my work psychologically. And I think that I'm much happier than a lot of people who didn't take time off because I know for one thing that I'm there by choice. I think that a lot of people who want to pursue a career in mathematics decide immediately to go to grad school because they just sort of pick up from the culture around them that that's what the good students do. And they pick up this ludicrous myth that you have to make your mark by age 30 or something. And they're really concerned by moving quickly and getting through as fast as possible. And I think that it probably hurts not just their work and that they're coming at whatever they're doing with a little bit less perspective, but I also think it hurts their mental health. I think that being in grad school, you're often surrounded by a lot of people who are quite unhappy, a lot of people who feel like they don't have a lot of agency over their lives. And when you've come back from something else and you know that you have other options for how you spend your time in the world and you know that you're doing whatever you're doing by choice, and you know that you're doing everything that you're doing because you want to be doing it and not because you feel somehow constrained by the culture around you or by lack of other options. So this is a very good point because there are more questions coming that I will build on. Mental health in grad school is a big issue that many people need to think about, and this is again, we're having somebody to talk to, it's a big issue. So great, and I encourage people to go and talk to you afterwards about this idea of taking time off. Many people take time off in a different way. Also, even within grad school, there are people who take a semester off. There's nothing to be ashamed about doing that. I was a freshman who took math. As a sophomore, I took no math, and here I am, none. Not a single course that was math. I was a philosophy major until late in my junior year. And the same professor who encouraged me to not take any math a year later encouraged me to come back and take math. So I figured that one out, but I saw a question over here. I guess this is sort of related to this same sort of idea and taking time off and stuff like that. How do you feel taking time off after your PhD before doing a post-doc, basically from a career risk in some sense? Because I feel in some sense that, if you don't do that immediately, there is some sort of stigma associated with the fact that you've left math. And it seems like it would become more difficult in order to get back into that sort of track. I guess my second sort of question is, do you think the post-doc grind necessarily has to be like this? Like, with the system, could you envision it in any other way? So it does.