Blag

Why a blag?

All the cool kids are doing it.  

True, but that’s not why. I often find myself writing an e-mail to one student that will take hours and wonder if others (specially those who may be unwilling, afraid, etc, to ask) would benefit from my responses. I thought that the most efficient way to reach them was to post them here. That being said, just because I wrote a blag post about something does not mean that students interested in talking to me need to have read it or that I am not happy to have a conversation about similar things again one-on-one. I figure it is mostly a place where I would like to store things for myself and collect my thoughts.

Most mathematicians that make blogs write about actual math. I doubt that I will ever really do that. There are often more important things to say that have no other venue. That is what I would like to post here.

Advice for Grad Students: Things that I wish someone had told me sooner

This list is aimed at graduate students. I tried to put in a mix of both big and very small things as well as some actionable items.  I also tied to include only the advice that you don't hear very often. 

1. Sign up to receive e-mails from the arXiv (there is a “subscribe” button way down at the bottom of the screen).

 This is about the easiest thing you can and should do. Someone (I think my husband) told me to do this and I wish I had done it sooner. You can subscribe only to the lists that are of interest to you and I, at minimum, read every title and author that comes through my inbox every day.  I usually scan most of the abstracts and one or two of the papers that I find interesting as well. When I started, I had no idea what most of the words were but this inspired me to find out more, helped me see what people were doing, who was doing it, and even gauge my progress in learning new areas/research questions.

2. Go to conferences.

I personally hate big meetings like Sectionals and the JMM but I love going to smaller subject specific conferences. For number theory, in particular, I try to regularly check numbertheory.org. Every once in a while, my advisor would send me a conference announcement but I was never urged by him to go and instead I just told him after the fact what I was doing. 

I spoke at my first conference in the spring of my 3rd year (I took 6 to graduate) and I think that is the perfect time. Conferences light a fire under your butt to get work done (both in preparation to speak and after seeing what everyone else is doing/has done). I went to as many as I could after that (minimum 3 a year) I also learned so much about what other mathematicians were up to and where my research fit into number theory at large.  Without going to conferences, it is really easy to misrepresent what people do at your institution as “the norm” or “the only thing that is important.”  What you and your advisor do may very well be important, but if you cannot put it into the context of the rest of mathematics/what everyone else understands, it is essentially useless. 

Finally, speaking at conferences early and often gave me practice and confidence for when I was ready to go on the job market. I knew how to give a good talk, I knew how to talk to other mathematicians and a lot of the silly, seemingly insignificant (but often paralyzing) aspects of giving a job talk can be prepared for.

OH! And! Most conferences will pay for (or at least supplement) travel expenses for grad students! So you may get to go somewhere really cool for free! ...Maybe I should have led with that...

3. Talk to your peers about your/their research.

This is something that I did do a bit in grad school but wish I would have done more of. I wish I would have tried harder to understand what my colleagues were doing in number theory and how it related to what I was doing. It would have been really nice to have found a side project that I could have started with my friends in grad school while we were there. 

4. Talk to the postdocs.

Generally, at each step of your career it is really good to make friends with people that are a stage ahead.  This will get you thinking about and understanding the next phase well before you are thrown into it.  

However, specifically as a grad student, there were a number of postdocs at UMN that I wish I would have talked about math with.  I now try to reach out to grad students more because I know that I personally was too intimidated to talk to the postdocs about math.  A postdoc may be able to “advise” you on a side project or be a good person to bounce your own ideas off of. 

5. Apply for fellowships.

This one is harder than it sounds.  It can take weeks of work to and odds are that you will not get the award. At this point most people say “but if you do it’s so worth it!” And that is true. Many are worth far more than a weeks worth of work, but I think the real value is elsewhere:

• They get easier and easier to apply for (since you have a draft already and maybe know what is required).

• You get better and better at writing them. Basically you write the first one and you are like “this is great!” then you look at it a year later and say “wow, that was crap!” and then write an even better one!

• It gives you drafts of your job documents and practice writing them.

Imagine if your first proposal was the most important one -- say for your dream job…  do you really want to submit the thing you will look back on a year later and called “crap”?

• It is part of your job! Many academic positions require (in some sense) you to write grant proposals very regularly so why not practice now while there is nothing to lose!

6. Don’t stress about grades and classes.

Literally no one looks at your transcripts.  You just need to graduate. 

7. Write every day.

By “write” I mean “.tex”. It doesn’t matter if you are really only copying down some definitions or Theorems into (what at least for now is) a notes file. The number of times  have found myself using that .tex’d up information later is always surprising. Furthermore,  I find if I go a day without .tex-ing, I likely did not make any real progress.  Even if I think I did get some math/research done, I will often find it was wrong, I have forgotten it or I lost that paper by the time I do go type it up. I find typing up my work immediately and looking at it written out in the clearest possible way gets me catching my mistakes far faster and allows me to keep forward momentum. Plus, as my advisor told me, it is far easier to fix mistakes in .tex than on a piece of paper.  Finally, I have found that many mathematicians (grad students in particular) get a fear of writing that compounds with time away and lack of practice.

8. Your advisor is very knowledgeable but may not be thinking about you (or your career) all the time.

This probably sounds odd but bear with me… A lot of grad students wait for their advisor to tell them to do something before doing it. For instance, many only go to a conference only if their advisor specifically tells them to.  (I have even asked students why they did not go to a particular conference and only to have them respond “My advisor didn’t tell me to.”) I guess that is fine, but, like, did your advisor tell you to brush your teeth this morning or turn in your homework? Clearly your advisor is not your mom (or maybe she is but I think it is safe to assume she is not) but more importantly, it has not occurred to some students that their advisor is just not thinking about them all the time. Sure, maybe they had a good reason for you not to go to a particular conference or publish that paper you have finished (not sure what one could be but I imagine it is possible) but more likely than not they have too many students, projects and priorities to be constantly thinking about what is best for your career at each moment. If you are in doubt about a particular thing, ask them, but it is not their job to bring every single opportunity that may benefit you up immediately.  That being said, some advisors do more of this than others, and that is OK too but soon you will leave the nest and it is good to creatively think about what actions take now and how they will benefit you in the future. It is your responsibility to find out what actions you can take now to get you where you want to be when (and after!) you graduate.

Q & A: Academic Rejection

• Have you experienced rejection in your career?  

I think my career has been roughly 50% rejection.  For every line on my CV I could write a paragraph of the crap I went through to get it. I have been planning for years to make a failure CV (FCV) but have not found the time.  I hope to do it soon.

• What should you do when your paper is rejected? 

You should do what you need to feel best – maybe it is eating ice cream, maybe it is having a beer, maybe it is going for a hike. Make sure you sit with the rejection for a minute and talk about it with someone you trust – take a day or an afternoon if that is what you need. Then I think it is best to do something that empowers and energizes you.  For me it is often going for a run or hike or spending time with my family.  

• How do you reach out to others (personally or professionally) when you’re struggling with something in your career? 

I think it is important to have the right “who” first. Don’t just reach out to the first person you think of and dump things on them. I also think it is a good rule of thumb to check in with others first. The person you may want to reach out to may be going through something much worse and unloading on them is unfair or tough. Or that person may have just gotten some great news from themselves so they will not be coming from the most empathetic place. Talk to someone you know will understand and will not judge but that you can trust to help you get to the right place. 

• Do your departments have open discussions on rejection in academia (from paper rejections, to rejections on the job market, grant rejections, … )?  If not, should they?  What would you like to see or hear in such a discussion? 

I have never been a part of a department that does this.  However, to be honest I am not sure that is what I want from my department. I think it is nice to have a friend who is not in your every day circle that you can confide in. I would not want everyone I work with knowing how much I suck all the time. In fact, it often gets me through that they DON’T know about my failures. This is a mental exercise that I work through regularly.  I instead try to think about how my coworkers see me. Now it is really important when doing this to only think through the facts that outsiders actually know about you (not how you feel or what you are speculating they must think of your worth).  Knowing that there are things that I suck at and my coworkers don’t know often makes me feel better! They probably have just as many things they have messed up but I have not seen.

• Personally, what steps do you take after a setback?  What about professionally?

First take care of yourself personally before you do anything professionally.

1. Get through the day – do what I gotta do to survive. I used to overlook this step but it is really important.

2. Honor the feelings of rejection when I can (talk to a friend, cry, just feel sad because it is OK to be sad sometimes.)

3. Do something for myself – even if it is small (go on a run, eat ice cream, take the night off and watch Netflix, etc).

4. Get back on the horse (submit the paper, look for the next grant to apply for, use this as an excuse to prove people wrong).

• How can we support graduate students and postdocs when they are facing rejection?

Tell our stories. Students especially only see our stories of success but it is so important that we tell them how many times we failed to get there and how much it hurt.  This is especially helpful if we can do this semi publicly so we can get rid of the stigma and shame.

• Do you have a beautiful redemption story?  

I have so many.  The most important ones to tell are the ones I find most shameful.  One I plan to make a whole blog post about not getting a job coming out of grad school. 

I will say I applied to the math phd program at the UMN first in 2010. I was rejected. Part of the reason I was rejected was because I was in the 11th percentile on the math GRE subject test. (I am SUCH a bad test taker.) I even have a Masters in math. I sat in on classes in the dept and passed their prelims – 2 years later I was accepted. I still took 6 years get through the program – I am very slow but math is not a race. 

This Is What Success Feels Like: What I Learned from Applying for the NSF Postdoc Twice

Read my full article in the Notices here. 

CV Templates

Overleaf has a number of very nice templates for CV's that can be found here: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv. 

You can also find the source files for my CV Template here. Note that you will need both the .tex and .cls file in the same folder (on either your computer or Overleaf) in order for it to compile properly.