Why Not Both?

By Jasmine Ng Jasmine Ng After graduate school in mathematics, most people continue in academia or find a job in industry. I never thought I would actually end up in both! Teaching has always been my true passion. However, after deciding to obtain my Ph.D. in pure mathematics, I thought that research would be my...

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Students Speak: The Value of Being an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

By Gustavo Flores Gustavo Flores Over the course of my secondary school years, I watched as my peers gradually sorted themselves into two neatly divided categories: math people and not-math people, a dichotomy reinforced by our teachers. As the latter group continued to grow year after year, I questioned whether my classmates and I were...

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Testimonios: Dr. Stephan Ramon Garcia

Testimonios, a new publication from MAA/AMS, brings together first-person narratives from the vibrant, diverse, and complex Latinx and Hispanic mathematical community. Starting with childhood and family, the authors recount their own particular stories, highlighting their upbringing, education, and career paths. Testimonios seeks to inspire the next generation of Latinx and Hispanic mathematicians by featuring the...

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Did you Tell Them?

By Deanna Haunsperger Deanna Haunsperger Carleton College has a new faculty workshop during winter break each year so that new faculty have an opportunity to intentionally reflect on the term that just finished, ask questions of established faculty, and re-energize to be ready to start the next term fresh. I greatly enjoyed this scheduled time...

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Students Speak: Pursuing a Math Degree as a Nontraditional Student during the Pandemic

By Alice Mehalek Alice Mehalek I took AP Calculus in my last year of high school and hated it. Even though I passed the class and the AP exam, I never felt like I understood the subject. Calculus was so incomprehensible to me that when I went to college the next year, I swore I’d...

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The First Year of Graduate School: Is It Really the Hardest?

By Verenalei Schoenfeld Verenalei Schoenfeld I am Lulu Schoenfeld, a rising 2nd year graduate student at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I just finished my first year of graduate school and attempted the qualifying exams for the first time. A year ago, when I was accepted to UCI, all the current students and faculty...

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Learnings from Transforming Elementary Statistics Courses into Online and Hybrid Offerings

By Brandi Falley and Ryan Sides Brandi Falley While the topics and depth covered in Elementary Statistics varies by school, it is still often a difficult course for the majority of students. Statistics is not a traditional math course where pattern recognition can aid in solving problems, and students are often forced to use logic...

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My Mathematical Journey: The q-Dyson theorem

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences I spent the fall of 1983 at the University of Minnesota supported by a Sloan Fellowship. Two important things happened that fall. The first was that I met Jan Alford,...

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How Can We Picture Information? How Can We Model It Mathematically? Part II

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin This month’s essay completes a thread commenced with the May, June and July posts. Last month, I described the sequence of events that led me to join an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) in 1987 to try and develop a...

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University Teaching Faculty: A New Job Opportunity

By Rebecca Swanson Rebecca Swanson To paraphrase one of my mentors, Erica Flapan, there are many different ways to be a mathematician. Many of us are familiar with the standard tenure-track path that emphasizes both teaching and research (to varying degrees) along with service. However, some of us discover our primary passion in teaching students...

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