Starting a research mathematics career
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Christina Sormani
Nov 8, 2013, 10:26:35 AM11/8/13
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This January Bettye Anne Case and I are organizing an AWM JMM panel "Building a Research Career in Mathematics". Perhaps we can start the conversation here in this group of Women in Mathematics. Recall that everyone allowed to post here is a tenured woman who is a member of a doctoral department. Remember also that all your posts (including posts via email reply to this message) are public. I will start the conversation with some basic questions that you can answer about your own careers. The actual AWM JMM forum will be interested in research by women in all kinds of departments.
Each of us has conducted a body of research (perhaps a set of papers or a single important paper) which directly lead to our first tenured appointment in a doctoral department. Lets focus on the circumstances of that body of research. Was it conducted in a doctoral granting department, and, if so, was it the same department where you landed tenure, or were you tenure track there but left or were you a postdoc? I have noticed increasingly many great mathematicians do 2-4 postdocs and then end up tenured without the distraction of being tenure track somewhere (possibly without even teaching at all). Alternatively, was this research conducted in another type of department, and were you tenure track or tenured there? I know some women who conducted great research at a liberal arts college and were tenured before switching to a doctoral department. After relating the location where you conducted your research that lead to tenure, please discuss how you conducted this research (on site, travelling, Skype,...), how you disseminated this research, and how this research garnered enough attention to lead to the tenured position (did you win a prize or get a grant? were you invited to apply for positions?) I know for those of us who just got tenure where we were already located, this may not have seemed like a major achievement, but there are so many stories where women don't get tenure that it is clear one needs some recognition to stay in place. As a friend of mine recently drew a parallel to Alice and the Red Queen running as hard as they can to stay in one place.
Each of us has conducted a body of research (perhaps a set of papers or a single important paper) which directly lead to our first tenured appointment in a doctoral department. Lets focus on the circumstances of that body of research. Was it conducted in a doctoral granting department, and, if so, was it the same department where you landed tenure, or were you tenure track there but left or were you a postdoc? I have noticed increasingly many great mathematicians do 2-4 postdocs and then end up tenured without the distraction of being tenure track somewhere (possibly without even teaching at all). Alternatively, was this research conducted in another type of department, and were you tenure track or tenured there? I know some women who conducted great research at a liberal arts college and were tenured before switching to a doctoral department. After relating the location where you conducted your research that lead to tenure, please discuss how you conducted this research (on site, travelling, Skype,...), how you disseminated this research, and how this research garnered enough attention to lead to the tenured position (did you win a prize or get a grant? were you invited to apply for positions?) I know for those of us who just got tenure where we were already located, this may not have seemed like a major achievement, but there are so many stories where women don't get tenure that it is clear one needs some recognition to stay in place. As a friend of mine recently drew a parallel to Alice and the Red Queen running as hard as they can to stay in one place.
Christina Sormani
Nov 8, 2013, 11:27:50 AM11/8/13
to women...@googlegroups.com
I will start off with my own story:
I was an assistant professor at CUNY Lehman College and CUNY Graduate Center when I conducted the research that lead to getting tenure at the same department. I would say there are two distinct sets of research that lead to my tenure. The first was a collection of papers which had been completed during my postdoc at Johns Hopkins. The second was a batch of research completed at CUNY. Both departments had an excellent research environment insofar as access to attend very interesting seminars and to communicate with top mathematicians. Most of my research was conducted alone (sole authored) and a some was conducted long distance by email exchange of a tex file with my coauthor Guofang Wei who was already tenured at UC Santa Barbara. The work conducted at JHU did not draw wide attention although some of it was published in top journals. Publishing in top journals combined with excellent advice about writing grant proposals given to postdocs at JHU, lead to my first NSF grant. I did not get the grant while a postdoc but only after the papers appeared in top journals, so the grant was awarded while tenure track at CUNY and helped me get tenure. It also lead to invitations to apply for tenure track positions at other doctoral departments but the NYC location was better for me because I had a baby and their grandparents were nearby to help. At my third year review I was told I need to sole author for tenure. Already half my work was sole authored and so this was not a problem for me, although it did mean that I had to explain to my favorite coauthor that we would need to postpone further joint work for a few years. I was also told I needed more service and with the fairly high teaching load, it was difficult to find time for research. At the same time I had another baby so I took an 18 month unpaid maternity leave and actually had more time for research watching a toddler and an infant than trying to keep up teaching and service at the same time, I sole authored a major work that I published in a top journal and this directly lead early tenure. The same chair who had given me the harsh scary three year review pushed me to go for early tenure (in part because of this publication and also because I still had the NSF grant). Because of the young children, I turned down many of the invitations to speak on this important sole authored paper. I believe that not traveling to speak is the reason I was not being offered other tenured positions at that time. Many of my colleagues at CUNY receive a round of offers of tenured positions when they get tenure. There is more to building my research career after tenure but that info is available on my webpage.
In terms of the actual research that garnered the most attention:
1) Solving a major step towards an open conjecture that was thirty years old and had stalled for ten years was a big part of getting the NSF grant. The fact that it was in a top journal counted well for my tenure committee, but the actual result was more important to the NSF review panel and also most likely to my anonymous tenure letter writers. So I do recommend working on major conjectures and devising new hypothesis that are natural and allow the conclusion to be reached. It also helped that the theorem is easy to state to someone outside of my field and that recognizable names had other partial results disjoint from my own (I wasn't just improving theirs but attacking the problem from a new direction). I had other solid papers at this time which also had partial solutions to other well known problems, as well as the coauthored ones with Wei exploring properties of certain spaces that other people were also exploring. These did not attract as much attention because they were more specialist but also because they were not particularly cited by the other members of the subarea at the time. Some were published in top journals and got citations later.
2) the major sole authored paper right before tenure was not a step towards an open problem but an interesting new application of a famous tool in my field to a different field. This reflected the fact that I had had the time to learn more about a second field while pursuing tenure. It is not a case of switching fields, but rather I had attended a colloquium style talk and asked a question and the speaker could not answer but directed me to a few classic texts. Upon reading these doctoral level texts, I saw the question had not been addressed. Searching the literature, it had been addressed only numerically. That confirmed that at least some people cared about the problem. I was very cautious not to work on problems no one cared about because of harsh comments from rejected NSF grant proposals and harsh referee reports. It was essential to be able to justify within two paragraphs why a problem was important and if it wasn't a conjecture with a name on it and a few famous people with early contributions, those two paragraphs are much harder to write. Once I felt I could justify the importance, I spent two years working on this project alone. I did other papers too, since it is dangerous to put all research in one project, but this was the paper that got me tenure and the others helped a little.
A bit more general advice: Above I mentioned providing context and justification for your work in an introduction to a paper or in a grant proposal. Also when writing an introduction for a paper, after it is completed, it is important to recheck the literature and the arxiv for newer papers that are relevant. In my subfield, introductions cite the work of others doing related work, not just the famous few people who boost the value of the paper in an obvious way, but also the other people who are climbing the ladder. We don't just cite references by number but write out a person's full name. I cannot say how often I have refereed a well written paper with a nice result that doesn't even mention related work. I will remind them to conduct a literature search and rewrite the introduction but some referees will be so annoyed that they reject the paper without even getting past the introduction. Remember the referees and the panelists on NSF review boards are not all famous and well known: they deserve credit for the work they have done too.
Another piece of advice: I find attending talks and conferences extremely important both for getting new ideas and keeping up with the field. If you cannot travel due to lack of funding, you can watch videos of talks given at MSRI and IAS and other places. I've done this often over the years when I was unable to travel. A couple times, a group of professors would get together in my department and watch an important video together and then discuss it. That was productive and easy to organize.
Some warnings: There are some kinds of service that require far more work than other kinds and weigh equally for tenure. I found that editing a book counted very little for tenure and was a lot of work. I found that committees involving faculty from different departments supposedly counted towards tenure but often involved long hours sitting listening to other people talk about issues not directly relevant to the math department like the writing requirements in liberal arts courses or whether education majors need leadership courses. I myself did not have a CAREER grant, but I know two recipients of CAREER grants who were overwhelmed by the amount of outreach they had promised to do. Depending upon the availability of staff, one can end up administering most of the distribution of the funding of a major grant oneself. I did very much enjoy coorganizing conferences and I think this is a wonderful way to meet new people with results that seem interesting, but be sure to have adequate staff to be in charge of reimbursing participants, laying out the teatime and other chores (even if that means writing funding for this staff into the grant). I organized a math circle for awhile when I was tenure track which I enjoyed because I just taught the circle one hour a week myself and it was fun working with smart high school kids. In terms of work it was like teaching a half course. I have since found out many faculty get some teaching credit for doing this kind of activity. I never did summer REUs or summer workshop organization. I spent 100% of my time in summers and in January break doing research.
I was an assistant professor at CUNY Lehman College and CUNY Graduate Center when I conducted the research that lead to getting tenure at the same department. I would say there are two distinct sets of research that lead to my tenure. The first was a collection of papers which had been completed during my postdoc at Johns Hopkins. The second was a batch of research completed at CUNY. Both departments had an excellent research environment insofar as access to attend very interesting seminars and to communicate with top mathematicians. Most of my research was conducted alone (sole authored) and a some was conducted long distance by email exchange of a tex file with my coauthor Guofang Wei who was already tenured at UC Santa Barbara. The work conducted at JHU did not draw wide attention although some of it was published in top journals. Publishing in top journals combined with excellent advice about writing grant proposals given to postdocs at JHU, lead to my first NSF grant. I did not get the grant while a postdoc but only after the papers appeared in top journals, so the grant was awarded while tenure track at CUNY and helped me get tenure. It also lead to invitations to apply for tenure track positions at other doctoral departments but the NYC location was better for me because I had a baby and their grandparents were nearby to help. At my third year review I was told I need to sole author for tenure. Already half my work was sole authored and so this was not a problem for me, although it did mean that I had to explain to my favorite coauthor that we would need to postpone further joint work for a few years. I was also told I needed more service and with the fairly high teaching load, it was difficult to find time for research. At the same time I had another baby so I took an 18 month unpaid maternity leave and actually had more time for research watching a toddler and an infant than trying to keep up teaching and service at the same time, I sole authored a major work that I published in a top journal and this directly lead early tenure. The same chair who had given me the harsh scary three year review pushed me to go for early tenure (in part because of this publication and also because I still had the NSF grant). Because of the young children, I turned down many of the invitations to speak on this important sole authored paper. I believe that not traveling to speak is the reason I was not being offered other tenured positions at that time. Many of my colleagues at CUNY receive a round of offers of tenured positions when they get tenure. There is more to building my research career after tenure but that info is available on my webpage.
In terms of the actual research that garnered the most attention:
1) Solving a major step towards an open conjecture that was thirty years old and had stalled for ten years was a big part of getting the NSF grant. The fact that it was in a top journal counted well for my tenure committee, but the actual result was more important to the NSF review panel and also most likely to my anonymous tenure letter writers. So I do recommend working on major conjectures and devising new hypothesis that are natural and allow the conclusion to be reached. It also helped that the theorem is easy to state to someone outside of my field and that recognizable names had other partial results disjoint from my own (I wasn't just improving theirs but attacking the problem from a new direction). I had other solid papers at this time which also had partial solutions to other well known problems, as well as the coauthored ones with Wei exploring properties of certain spaces that other people were also exploring. These did not attract as much attention because they were more specialist but also because they were not particularly cited by the other members of the subarea at the time. Some were published in top journals and got citations later.
2) the major sole authored paper right before tenure was not a step towards an open problem but an interesting new application of a famous tool in my field to a different field. This reflected the fact that I had had the time to learn more about a second field while pursuing tenure. It is not a case of switching fields, but rather I had attended a colloquium style talk and asked a question and the speaker could not answer but directed me to a few classic texts. Upon reading these doctoral level texts, I saw the question had not been addressed. Searching the literature, it had been addressed only numerically. That confirmed that at least some people cared about the problem. I was very cautious not to work on problems no one cared about because of harsh comments from rejected NSF grant proposals and harsh referee reports. It was essential to be able to justify within two paragraphs why a problem was important and if it wasn't a conjecture with a name on it and a few famous people with early contributions, those two paragraphs are much harder to write. Once I felt I could justify the importance, I spent two years working on this project alone. I did other papers too, since it is dangerous to put all research in one project, but this was the paper that got me tenure and the others helped a little.
A bit more general advice: Above I mentioned providing context and justification for your work in an introduction to a paper or in a grant proposal. Also when writing an introduction for a paper, after it is completed, it is important to recheck the literature and the arxiv for newer papers that are relevant. In my subfield, introductions cite the work of others doing related work, not just the famous few people who boost the value of the paper in an obvious way, but also the other people who are climbing the ladder. We don't just cite references by number but write out a person's full name. I cannot say how often I have refereed a well written paper with a nice result that doesn't even mention related work. I will remind them to conduct a literature search and rewrite the introduction but some referees will be so annoyed that they reject the paper without even getting past the introduction. Remember the referees and the panelists on NSF review boards are not all famous and well known: they deserve credit for the work they have done too.
Another piece of advice: I find attending talks and conferences extremely important both for getting new ideas and keeping up with the field. If you cannot travel due to lack of funding, you can watch videos of talks given at MSRI and IAS and other places. I've done this often over the years when I was unable to travel. A couple times, a group of professors would get together in my department and watch an important video together and then discuss it. That was productive and easy to organize.
Some warnings: There are some kinds of service that require far more work than other kinds and weigh equally for tenure. I found that editing a book counted very little for tenure and was a lot of work. I found that committees involving faculty from different departments supposedly counted towards tenure but often involved long hours sitting listening to other people talk about issues not directly relevant to the math department like the writing requirements in liberal arts courses or whether education majors need leadership courses. I myself did not have a CAREER grant, but I know two recipients of CAREER grants who were overwhelmed by the amount of outreach they had promised to do. Depending upon the availability of staff, one can end up administering most of the distribution of the funding of a major grant oneself. I did very much enjoy coorganizing conferences and I think this is a wonderful way to meet new people with results that seem interesting, but be sure to have adequate staff to be in charge of reimbursing participants, laying out the teatime and other chores (even if that means writing funding for this staff into the grant). I organized a math circle for awhile when I was tenure track which I enjoyed because I just taught the circle one hour a week myself and it was fun working with smart high school kids. In terms of work it was like teaching a half course. I have since found out many faculty get some teaching credit for doing this kind of activity. I never did summer REUs or summer workshop organization. I spent 100% of my time in summers and in January break doing research.
Marianne
Nov 11, 2013, 5:45:05 PM11/11/13
to women...@googlegroups.com
Truth be told I strictly followed my taste in my math. I was not stingy with my time regarding service, as long as I cared about the thing to do. Looking at my production I find that 5 papers I would call important, and also original. Originality has always helped me out and perhaps for this reason I really look for what appeals to me. I care little about planning anything, nor about the difficulties involved in the problem. Since it always worked out, I am still that reckless. I always worked in doctoral departments, as a student, postdoc, or visitor, or tenure track. Abroad they ran from nationally leading (Argentina, Poland, Spain, Italy) to not so leading (France) to Group I Private (postdoc) and Group II in the US. I second the importance of conferences, in the very wording Christina used. In case of lack of money, when I had only one child I just took her along and drove. I can be frugal.
Judith Roitman
Nov 11, 2013, 5:53:54 PM11/11/13
to women...@googlegroups.com
I was a long time ago so my experience is not that relevant, but yes a mathematical community is very helpful and conferences are an important way to do that. In my critical years I was part of a floating community that met up 3 or 4 times a year in various places, usually at conferences but one memorable summer we all just kind of showed up in Madison; and also part of a semi-fixed community of folks who all lived in or near Boston/Cambridge. I don't know how much things like Math Overflow can fill this kind of need.
Also, I started out in a department with no graduate degrees at all, but hung out with a seminar group at MIT and got my first NSF money through that group; from there I went to IAS and then a doctoral department. Having two academic sponsors --- one in the fixed community and one in the floating one --- undoubtedly helped a lot.
"I like not to know for as long as possible because then it tells me the truth instead of me imposing the truth." Michael Moschen
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Christina Sormani
Feb 22, 2014, 11:59:02 PM2/22/14
to women...@googlegroups.com
Mei-Chi Shaw has written an article "A woman mathematician's journey" and the third chapter is about "Becoming a Mathematician". It will be published in a book editted by Steven Krantz. She asked me to post a link to the article here:
Please pass on the link to young women who may find the story helpful.
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