 You alleged question, can you change the system yourself and does the system need to be this way? Henry looks like he's grabbing the mic. So, I mean, I didn't take off any time to graduate school and postdocs, so I can't comment to that. I mean, I've been on hiring committees. You know, if there's a gap in the CV, people will wonder what it was. If you've got a good story for what you were doing, then it's probably not a problem. You know, you put in the cover letter what you were doing that year and why it was interesting, and I imagine if it's something interesting, then it probably is not a problem. As for how to change it, I think, or what you could possibly do. I mean, the problem is that the funding agencies or the funding bodies that lead to people being supported to do math are spread around the world and the people doing your stuff are also unevenly spread around the world. I'm not sure how to fix that. Save all of us living in the matrix and then we don't have to travel. Ivan, you have some comments on this? So certainly, you know, it's a question of how much time you wanna take. If you just wanted to take a year, you might possibly be able to get a postdoc and defer it for a year or do something of that and that's a much safer bet. You know, if you wanna go and teach for a year in some school district or, you know, try something else. You know, if you go for a few years, the problem is that, you know, all of the forward progress you've made in your PhD gets, you know, you kind of lose track of everything that's going on, people lose track of you. You know, if on the other hand, you feel like you need to kind of reset the area of math that you're working in, there are options like spending a semester or a year at one of the NSF funded institutes, you know, MSRI, for instance, and, you know, immerse yourself in something different. Or, you know, also you can do summer internships and stuff like that, or you could work at a more industrial sort of postdoc. So, you know, it's maybe, it depends on the type of math, but of course Microsoft is one option. Maybe there's still some stuff at Bell or some of the other industry research labs have options. And that's also nice because it gives you another way of seeing how organizations run and seeing kind of, and that can help you kind of motivate yourself to work harder and once you see kind of a more corporate culture. Rave, did you have a comment to add on this question? I've seen, you know, quite a lot of people over the years take time off and, you know, very, I mean, we've hired, you know, at Stanford people who had taken two or three years off, I mean, I can think of at least two cases to work in the financial industry and then decided to get back into mathematics. I remember actually somebody who will remain nameless, but he became a well-known mathematician who I was a graduate student with, became a, who was a student of Percy's and Percy Diconis and he went off to live in a South Sea Island for a year and came back and did very well at mathematics. So, you know, anything's possible if you have the will, but I think that, you know, what Henry said is that, you know, by and large it helps to have a good cover story, you know, when you come back and to explain what you do. I think that people do care about that and anytime you're applying for jobs. If there's sort of a year where it looks like you've been doing nothing, it's, you know, you really have to explain that. Okay, more questions in the audience. Sorry, there's one right here. Okay, so that one, then there was one back there and then up here. So my first question would be, when's the right time to have kids or is there a right time to have kids? And my second question would be that if you want to get into a new field because you feel it's interesting or it might relate to the work that you've been doing so far but you don't speak the language, say for example, random matrices, how do you get into that field and into the community? Come to PCMI, oh, no, sorry. Let me answer the second question. I don't have kids yet, so. I think we're gonna split this and stick to the second question and then to the first question. So, you know, yeah, come to these sort of summer schools is a great place and talk to people, introduce yourself, tell them, you know, I'm learning, I'm interested, and maybe find somebody who can mentor you and kind of point you in the direction of what you should read and how you should get into the field. While you're passing the microphone, I'll add some advice until we get to Irina. Switching fields, I don't think one does a huge leap for switch, but when it gradually moves is sort of the best way to do it. You know, switching from pure algebra to analysis, very far apart things might be a really bad idea as a postdoc, you won't publish anything for a while. Yeah, I think there are definitely growing pains when you're switching areas, but one thing in the transition period, if you could find the problem that kind of bridges the tool and forces you to learn the other side that you don't know very well, that is an easier transition. Yeah, sometimes also senior people switch areas, they take a sabbatical year, the whole year to actually learn a new subject. And still, it's not switching across the whole spectrum, but maybe to nearby area that where, you're working on SPDs and then you switch to random matrices. But some people have heard also of some people switching completely to completely different fields and again, it takes time. So, sabbatical year is usually a good time for that, but not as a postdoc, yeah. Okay, so now we're gonna tackle part two, which was your first part of your question, which is when and if is the right time to have kids. This applies equally to men and women, I will say, and these days, especially with more equality, men have to think about this a lot as well. Get it back. Well, I can say, I don't think there's a right time to have kids. I'm gonna interrupt that. There isn't a wrong time is what I was gonna say. Oh, yeah, okay. That's not, yeah. There isn't a perfect time that now or never, and it just depends on how you feel, I think, and it's very personal. It's always gonna be difficult. So you can, panelists are free not to say, I will say for myself, what I think is helpful to hear. I have two kids. One was while I was tenure track, and one was my tenure baby. So everyone said, don't have a kid while tenure track. It didn't stop me. It did get me to chair a committee on maternity leave, but that's a different issue. Yeah, I have two boys. One was a postdoc year, and then the other one, tenure track time. And yeah, you just, I don't know, I wasn't ready to give up my mouth, but still wanted to also balance the family. So I just sleep suffered, basically. I slept, you know, slept less, still sleep very little. But yeah, it's challenging. And talking to friends, sometimes you see people who do it very well, so you can ask them, what's the magic formula? I don't think there is either. I don't have children myself, but I have friends who are in mathematics as well as in education who do have children. And I can tell you that there are people who had children while they were in graduate school, people who had children on a postdoc, people who had children when they were pre-tenure, post-tenure. So I think this answer is the right one. You know, it's a personal choice. And I think it helps to have a really good network of support, including your partner, but other people to help you. And all the people that I'm thinking about who had these babies at different times have done very well and succeeded. So I think the one thing that I would say is that if someone tries to tell you, oh, it's a disaster to have a baby at this time, don't listen to that, to do what's best for you and your family and to get your support network in order. I got to my postdoc pregnant. I was told by my officemate that I should have waited until 10 year. But I think there is a wrong time to have a baby. Don't wait until you're after 40. It makes it much more difficult. There are a lot of issues. Have a baby when you're younger. It's easier to stay up late and deal with whatever is necessary. You have much more energy. I think having a child also made me a more efficient person at work. We didn't have internet at that time, but I couldn't go on Facebook or something, play all day like my friends could or whatever we were doing at that time to waste time. I had to be very efficient. Now I'm doing work so that then in the evening I can go home and play choo-choo train or whatever we were playing. So there's time to work efficiently and then there's time when you are with your child. And they're not separate. There's nothing to stop you from doing math with a kid in a Bjorn at a conference. I've given a lecture with a kid there. If he was sick, I couldn't leave him. So he was there, I lectured. There's no wrong time. Okay, I know there's a question. Just one quick. So someone once commented to me that it was about having children, but I think it applies to many other things. You'll discover through having children, having to balance things, the human's infinite ability to juggle. So you think you can't do it, but then you discover that actually you can. And that there are other things that you can't do and then you can't. Henry's gonna teach us how to juggle later. So there was a question back here. Yeah, hi. I don't know that this is like a fully formed question, but I think I'm just curious to hear if any of you had any significant mental health experiences over the course of your career arc and how you sort of dealt with that, managing whatever mental health difficulties you may or may not have had and how that kind of affected your productivity at work, I guess. So I will speak to this first. I think every mathematician has suffered mental health issues, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Some of these are the ups, that cakewalk when you prove something, but most of that time is not. Now, I'm not sure if people wanna speak to some specific or if people have experiences to share, but I can guarantee you that if you probe any group of mathematicians, people have had mental health issues. There are stigmas, but there are many issues and I'm not sure if anyone wants to comment. I didn't have any mental health issues in terms of I would have to go to a psychiatrist, but when I was pregnant, I couldn't remember words. I couldn't remember how to prove a lemma that was easy for me a few months ago, and while I was breastfeeding, my words weren't coming out. I was not thinking, it was very, very difficult for me. How I got over it, I don't know. Stop breastfeeding, I don't know. Some people say that when they have a baby, they have this new energy. For me, it was just something happened to my brain and it wasn't there. Also, there were times when, in my post-doc years at the University of Michigan, everybody there has the best teaching scores, the best research, the best babies. Their babies all slept through the night, mine didn't, mine didn't. It's amazing how, that was my perception that I was at the bottom of all the ladders there, and that was very difficult too. Then at some point, I was like, well, they can't all be right, so I let me just live my life, and yeah, I think that was my experience. So I actually had a fair number of health problems in graduate school. I got very sick my second year, and I had some problems my fifth year too, and I was incredibly depressed, basically was ready to quit, didn't want to do this anymore, I was done. That's totally normal. That's totally normal. Even into my sixth year, I was applying for post-docs, I wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do. I got to my post-doc and I was still not quite sure that's what I wanted to do. So I guess what I would say is it's normal, but that doesn't mean that you have to treat it like it's okay. So, I mean, I didn't wind up going to therapy, but I had friends who did, and they were really self-conscious about the fact that they were seeing a therapist, the fact that they were on antidepressants, but if that helps, if that makes things better, then that's what you should do. The other thing is that I think it's really easy to get wrapped up, like too wrapped up in the department, or in math. Not the doing of the math, but the being around the same people who do math all the time and thinking that your advisor's opinion of you is your entire world, and this is everything. So get another perspective, and if that other perspective comes from going to therapy, that is a great use of therapy. But it can also just be have friends who aren't in the department. Have friends who can sort of pull you out and make you realize that, hey, it's okay, this isn't the end of the world, and I don't know, it's just really easy to get wrapped up in, and it's totally normal to want to quit, all the time. Senior mathematicians will tell you the same. This is not a phenomenon that ever ends. That's one of the things you're getting into. We have time for one or two more questions. There's one right here. So as students and postdocs, we're taught to be great researchers and occasionally we're taught to be okay teachers, but that's only a tiny bit of being a faculty member. So what advice do you have for all of the students out there on things that you didn't know coming into becoming a faculty member and things that they can work on as students and postdocs? Great question. Aside from the obvious of research and teaching, what else, organizing PCMI? Yeah? Yeah, I always say that we're very underpaid because there are lots of things that we do that we're not trained to do. Being on hiring committees, for example, companies have special people for that and you have to learn the ropes as you go, but yeah, there are many things beyond research and teaching. You know, apply for grants, handle your colleagues during hiring season and so on. You just learn as you go, I think. It's good to have role models. I think something that happens to a lot of women, particularly younger women in academia, whatever the field, is that they get sort of pulled into a lot of service and so you want to try to avoid that and so I'm appealing to everyone in this room who's gonna eventually be a professor, male and female, to think about this. Don't dump all the service on one or two people who happen to be female or from ethnic minority groups that happens as well. So I think it's important to learn how to say no. I know how to say no very charmingly, that helps a lot. And when I do end up doing some service that I haven't specifically sought out, let's just say it that way, I try to make sure that it's something that's really going to count and matter, not just to me or for me, but to the institution, something that's not just mindless service, it's not gonna have any impact. But it's important to learn how to say no. It's also important to have senior allies who can protect you from doing too much of this kind of service responsibility. But it is something that people don't really prepare you for and then suddenly you get asked to be on all these committees or whatever it is and you're kind of stymied into how to handle that. I would say that when you do get put on a committee if you agree to it, I think there are ways of saying no, sometimes that's harder to say no than others. But when you are on a committee, especially when it comes to other people's career and how they're perceived, do a really good and thorough and conscientious job. It may take extra time, but you will be able to look everybody in the eye. The counterpoint, I don't know the solution to this problem, but there are certainly members of faculty who do a terrible job on committees and do a terrible job teaching and they have tenure. And the result is that people deciding on who gets to do what, say, well, do we really wanna inflict this person on that class? There's no point in putting them on that committee. So I guess that's not advice, but I don't know what to do about this problem, but it is a problem that's there. So I guess two things. Regarding when you come to a university or when you come to any job, you might think that there's a handbook and they tell you this is how things work. When I started at Columbia, nobody told me anything. Literally, I just sat in my office and I'm like, now what do I do? And so the thing is to make friends with people, colleagues who've been there a little longer, maybe not so much longer and ask questions, figure out how things work and it takes a while. It takes a few years to really, it takes longer than that, to really see how things work in your university or even your department. So really, try to get involved, try to be a good citizen in learning about how it works so that you can make it better if you have problems with it. And the other thing is a lot of time, and like Brian has said, is service to not just your university, but to your field. And so get involved in refereeing, get involved in helping students, get involved in organizing stuff, and it can take a lot of time, so don't get too involved. But these are other services that are not the research or the teaching, but that can be very important and also very fulfilling. So I think we have time for one more. There was a question back there. While the microphone's moving back, I will amplify some of the things that were said here. I do think it's, we'll give you a comment. I have friends with staff. Right, a couple of comments about this is I do believe that when you're tenure track, you really do have the right to politely say no, because when you're tenure track for many people in a research institution, especially, you need to do your research. In a primarily undergraduate institution, there is more of a service expectation usually, and you have to do great teaching, but you also have to leave time for your research. After that, I think there is less of a right to be able to say no. And as Diane pointed out, there are many ways you can get around this. When you make friends with the staff, they tell you who does what, and it's very helpful to be friendly with the staff in these ways. So there was a question back there. This is a related question, I suppose. Speaking about parts of the field other than research, what can you do maybe during grad school that might set you apart as a hiring committee sees you, apart from being the best researcher at your institution, what can you do to make them say, oh, this person would be a good fit at our institution, or this is somebody we'd like to have here? So this is something we unfortunately didn't get to touch on much on this panel. I'll try to do it quickly as we wrap up with this. And I will point out that the answer to your question is highly dependent on the job you're applying for and what institution you're trying to head to. And we have a wide range of universities here, and the answer is different for each of them. So maybe we'll give each person a chance to say something about this that would be relevant for the type of institution they're currently at, or where a grad student at, whichever one they prefer to. I guess it just, I mean, my experience has been that, and not everybody has this experience, but every position that I've got was somebody knew who I was already. They knew my work, they were in a related field, maybe I met them in a conference. So talk to people. Yeah, certainly when you're in that level, you wanna go to conferences, introduce yourself, get your name out there, try to do that. Also, when you're in grad school, one thing that I did, I was encouraged to do, it was run a seminar, a reading seminar. Take initiative, do that, maybe write a review paper on something. Try to establish yourself as somebody who really knows a lot about an area, and make sure it's clear to others that that's the case as well. And get a good mentor for when you're applying, because ultimately it's gonna be a case-by-case thing. And if you don't have somebody there walking you through the process, and this is true in many ways, when you get offers and stuff, if you don't have somebody there telling you, wait on this one, don't take this one, you'll get pushed into something that you don't wanna be doing. So as it's passed to Irina, for example, the cover letter going to her institution versus the cover letter going to my institution, these are two separate, completely separate things. Yes, I'm at the liberal arts college, so teaching is very important for us. If you have only taught recitation sections, we are not likely to look at you very carefully. So try to make sure that you teach some independent course without somebody telling you what's on the syllabus this week, or that you just go and solve problems. We like to see some strong teaching initiative. Also, we are a small department, so we are unlikely to hire people in our own area. We try to spread research areas in the department, so just because you have friends here, the chances are you will not get in. The other thing is, yes, we are liberal arts institution, but every senior writes a thesis, and they all want to write a thesis about this connecting this and that part of math, so we have to be, professors have to be generalists and be able to help these students who want to connect the disparate things. So we want to see good research for you, just because you've barely passed your PhD thesis, that's not good enough for us. You really have to have ideas for undergraduate projects, and so on. What I would say is very, I think, education field relevant, and I think it would raise anxiety if I told you what would make you stand out in education, so I'm gonna not say that. I encourage you to ask Erica afterwards, in private. So it is good to have a mentor who would help you, especially when it gets to the point of the interview. Giving a good talk, a job talk is very important. A lot of people give very technical talks and don't realize how many, you know, the whole department is coming. They know only 10% maybe of the vocabulary that you're gonna use. So it's, and for a young person, it's very difficult to actually hit the right level. And having a mentor who's experienced who would listen to your talk ahead of time and give you advice is very important. And also to be, well, if people know you, the department know about your research, then your file has a higher chance of being picked up from the list of 400, 600 files. And teaching, even at a research institute, teaching is you don't want, you know, flags to be raised by, so someone is defending your file and someone else says, but their teaching sucks and they give a bad colloquium talk. That actually makes it very difficult even if someone is trying to defend your case, even for them, it's gonna be difficult. So yeah. So I guess I can't say a lot about hiring practices, but I think, yeah, knowing people, that's sort of the easiest way to, particularly if you're looking for a postdoc, if you know someone in your field that you're really interested in working with, you should reach out to them, talk to them before you apply, right? Like don't just do it in the application phase. I guess the other thing I would say is not really an advice about like what would make your application stand out, but something that's really helped me this year with putting applications together is that if you have other friends who are also applying, I would very much encourage you to sit down in a group and actually like set aside some time every week to start getting those application materials together early and submitting them early. It makes the whole process go much, much better. Especially if you have letter writers and you want them to look at your materials before they write the letter, get it to them early. Of your letter writers will be writing 20, 30, 40 letters in a year. You don't want to be the 35th letter they're writing. So I strongly encourage all of you to seek out the panelists or any other person who is here for advice. If you had questions you didn't feel comfortable in public or you wanted to hear more, please, they're around. You'll see them this afternoon or later during the program and please let's give a big thanks to all the panelists. Thank you.