I am committed to social justice, and I aim to demonstrate that commitment by staying active in my community.
When I first arrived at UT, I joined a volunteer organization called the Texas Prison Education Initiative (TPEI). Our mission is to provide free credit-bearing college courses to incarcerated youths and adults. You can read more about my work in a pre-print of my upcoming paper in Notices of the AMS.
I have since taught the college-prep math course, an elective course on art and mathematics, and currently I am teaching precalculus (M305G). My goal is to continue teaching math courses that require M305G as a prerequisite to my students, who want to study and pursue careers in STEM post-incarceration. This is the first time TPEI has offered the course, so I'm very passionate about helping my students succeed as well as creating resources and materials for future TPEI instructors. I'm also very grateful to the faculty, administrators, and fellow volunteers who made this course a reality.
As is true for many people I have since learned, I struggled in the transition from grad student to postdoc. For instance, a recent Google search of mine was "how to retirement account?"
It's essentially the purgatory of academia where you're not a student but you're not faculty. There's no "cohort" because positions have varying start dates. You're then gone relatively fast because you have to start applying for jobs almost immediately after being hired. These challenges also make it difficult to form an organization of all postdocs on campus.
Thankfully, with funding and support from the university, we are founding a chapter of the National Postdoctoral Association at UT! If you'd like to receive updates and news about upcoming social or professional development events, join our listserv. Slides from a UTPA meeting with some helpful resources and information for postdocs can be found here.
In the summer of 2020, I was one of the founding members of the NCSU Department of Mathematics' DEI Committee, comprising 9 faculty and staff members and 3 graduate students.
The committee's mission was to improve the culture of our department particularly as it relates to diversity, to diversify our department, and to use our influence to make the 'pipeline' of mathematical talent more equitable. We proposed five key areas of emphasis for our efforts: (1) graduate student recruitment, retention, and support; (2) departmental climate; (3) undergraduate student support; (4) K-12 outreach; and (5) faculty hiring, retention, and support.
Prior to and during my time on the departmental committee, I'd been working with other PhD students (Catie Acitelli, Cashous Bortner, Everett Meike, Ezra Nance, and Ashley Tharp) on what we called the 'New Curriculum' aimed at early-career grad students. We were driven by two questions. First, what resources, tools, and information have made or would have made grad school easier? After all, it's the math that should be the hardest part of math grad school. Moreover, since no one--in grad school, math, or life--is an island, how do we foster a sense of community in our department through our DEI work?
To broaden our impact, I thought we should all join forces. I suggested to the DEI committee that in our fall report to the department chair, we propose 3 new TA positions to support graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students institutionally. The idea was well-received, and our grad student-led 'New Curriculum' merged with an existing first-year graduate student seminar course headed by a teaching professor and a brand-new Graduate Student Resource TA. The new seminar is being piloted in the 2021-2022 academic year, and an undergraduate outreach TA has also begun work now on a similar institutional support structure for NCSU math undergrads. I was invited to give a talk about this work at the Fall 2021 paraDIGMS conference for Diversity in Graduate Mathematics, and my slides can be found here.