As Dan mentioned in his post a few weeks ago, we’ve just revamped our mentoring program at Berkeley.   I think Dan gave some excellent tips on the academic side of things, and so I thought I’d write some advice from a different angle.  I’m finding more and more that grad school isn’t all about the research and the math.  To give an example, the math department ran a workshop a few weeks ago that I’ll call “A friendly visit from the university psychologist.”  The discussion basically centered around the stress involved in being a graduate student and ways of managing it.  It was really useful to have a candid discussion about this side of the graduate school experience, and we got some useful tips, which I’ll share below as well as some of the things I’ve found helpful.

My basic advice for entering grad students would be to find a balance and minimize stress.  Easier said than done, right?   It’s easy to think that math is the only thing that matters, and that more hours per day means more productivity.  But this isn’t true.  Everyone has their limit and after that point, working more doesn’t necessarily mean that more will get done.  I’m a firm believer that success means being happy with what you’re doing.  And I’m never happy when I’m stressed.  Busy weeks will happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it, but try to have some activities other than math that you do on a regular basis.  Something constant.  Maybe it’s reading for pleasure on your commute each morning, or maybe it’s singing or dancing with a group on campus.  During my first year, an older student told me to seek out these things, and once I did – and it took some time to actually do it – I found it helped a lot.

Yes, math grad school is ultimately about preparing academically through research and teaching, but I’ll be the first to say that if work is all I get to do during grad school, or later as a professor, then I want out now!  Although this statement might be vacuous – I don’t think anyone works all the time – I think it’s an important point.  During the discussion with the psychologist many students said they felt guilty when they watched a sunset, or went on a hike, because it was time they weren’t doing math.  These breaks from study help refresh us.  The guilt, however, does nothing.   Take time for math, take time to talk to others (I strongly ditto what Dan said for going to tea), but also take time for yourself.

I want to alert the blog readers that much has changed this year about how the Employment Center will operate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, January 13-16, 2010. Registration and scheduling are now completely electronic, and registration is free.

We have a new website which combines our job listing service (EIMS) with the Employment Center data. The jobs are publicly viewable and new listings are coming in daily. Note especially the jobs that have the tiny “EC” logo, meaning that job will be interviewed for at the Employment Center.

Register at the website at any time from now through January 13, but be aware that employers will probably start setting schedules in late November, so early registration is important (you will see that a deadline of November 2 is suggested). Applicants register by creating an account, answering some questions, uploading a few general application documents, and checking the “click here if you will be attending the EC” button on the main page of their account. They also mark any unavailable times on their schedule grid.

Joint Math Meetings registration is necessary since there will be no admittance to the room without a meeting badge. This is required by the Joint Meetings Committee which oversees the meeting. It is not a new requirement, but enforcing it at the door (instead of during the registration process) is new.

After perusing the jobs, applicants use the “request an interview” buttons on the job listings to indicate that they would like to interview for that particular job. They enter a brief note or cover letter and attach a few documents from their account if the employer does not already have their full application elsewhere. There is no limit on the number of requests that can be made. Once a request is made, the employer may or may not respond by entering themselves into the applicant’s schedule. If they do, the applicant will see the appointment and its duration on their schedule. Only mutually available times can be used, so keep your schedule up to date. This scheduling is by mutual agreement only – the applicant requests, and the employer agrees or ignores it. Therefore, it is possible that some applicants will end up with no interviews.

Applicants should check their accounts for “New messages” and “Interviews” noted in the EC box on their “my account” screen. Note there will be no paper messaging on site since interview arrangements are now made through the system. If applicants accept a private invitation to interview (not through the system) they will want to mark that time as unavailable in their schedule grid.

The job market seems to be shifting earlier, so many employers are accepting applications now (through mathjobs.org or other channels) and plan to conduct some short list screening at the EC. So early registration, and clicking through to request appointments wherever reasonable, is important. So far, there are 32 employers and 253 applicants registered.

AMS staff are here to answer questions. Call Steve Ferrucci or Diane Boumenot 800-321-4267, ext. 4113. Good luck with the job search!

Andrew Obus’ post on how to do a job search inspired me to do my own post on how not to do a job search.  As most are probably aware, the market was unkind last year, to the point where small schools were getting hundreds of applicants for one-year positions offered in April and May.  I was one of the semi-fortunate ones, getting a one year position in late April; of course, this means that I’ll be back on the market this year.  The good news is that now, I’m armed with all of the information I learned from all of the mistakes I made, as well as all of the mistakes that my friends made.  In this article, I’ve listed some of the bigger ones.

We’ll start with the ones I made:

- Know the info on the school to which you are applying, but don’t go nuts.  If you get an interview with a school, it is a good idea to look at the school’s website and figure out the school’s philosophies (liberal arts? religious? engineering?), faculty interests, etc.  Be careful of trying to memorize specific facts and figures, though; if you transpose a digit or mix up two figures, you’re going to look and feel pretty stupid.    It’s more important to understand how you would fit into the department than it is to know that the department graduated 17 math majors last year, and if it comes up in an interview, you’re far less likely to misspeak on the former than on the latter.

An illustrative story:  I was interviewing for a job last year, and the logical first question they asked was, “What do you know about our school?”  Eager to impress, I said, “Well, it’s a school of 1,200 students…”  I was off by a factor of four; I suppose that if I had quickly added, “per class,” I might have recovered.  Anyway, they might as well have ended the interview right there.  One of the interviewers actually spent the entire rest of the interview overtly staring at the clock (note to potential interviewers: please don’t do this – it’s just cruel.)  Even if interviewers don’t see this as a death knell, it’s a terrible first impression.

- Don’t be too timid to apply.  I crossed a couple of schools off of my list last year because I thought I had so little chance that it wasn’t worth my time in sending an application.  I thought nothing of it until I was talking to a colleague at one such school and explained my reasoning, and he said, “I wish you hadn’t done that.  We could have interviewed you, but it’s probably too late now.”

If schools think that you’re not worthy of their position, they’ll be more than happy to put your resume in the recycling bin, but it’s not like they’re going to laugh at your application and blacklist you from ever applying again unless you wrote your cover letter in crayon and littered your teaching statement with expletives.  If they don’t accept you, they don’t accept you, but if you would like to work at a school, well, there’s no sense in throwing away a lottery ticket just because it probably won’t win, and sending out an application doesn’t take very long at all.

This is actually a sub-point of the more general point:

- Humility has no place in a job search.  There’s no reason that you should be anything but flatteringly complementary to yourself, because if you don’t sell yourself, no one will do it for you.  This seems obvious, and that’s because it is.  What’s not obvious, however, is that this applies at all times and in all places.  You would never say, “My research stinks,” in a research statement or interview, but making a dismissive comment about your research in a talk (I’ve seen it happen), saying something particularly self-deprecating to colleagues at a conference, or putting an unflattering comment about yourself on your website can be just as bad.  If you are on the market, you are a salesman for yourself at all times.

I can be somewhat self-deprecating in my sense of humor.  I’m sure it’s charming socially, but it’s a terrible idea on a job hunt.  If you’re like me, it’s time to break the habit – at least for now.

I also asked a friend about his mistakes, and he came up with the following:

- Proofread everything. Are there typos in your cover letter?  If so, you can save the shipping costs and just throw your application directly into the trash.  Did you spell the school’s name wrong, or forget to change the school’s name in one of the places where you were supposed to copy and paste?  You won’t be working there any time soon.  Does your research statement state your key theorems incorrectly? You will likely serve to confuse the hiring committee, and a confused hiring committee is an unreceptive hiring committee.  The bottom line is this: your application is your way of introducing yourself to the school, and if your documents give off an “I rushed this and don’t care about quality” feel, you’ve given them a good reason to feel that they don’t want you as a colleague.

This is another one of those things that sounds easy, but if you’re sending out 99 applications (which is the number I sent last year), submitting typo-free documents requires a good bit of concentration, so you have to be extremely careful.

- Personalize your letters.  In cover letters, give schools the sense that you want their job, not just any job.  In particular, it’s good to make sure that it looks like you read what the school is looking for in the job advertisement.  My friend had one cover letter for much of last year, emphasizing what a great researcher he was.  Nevertheless, he sent this letter to numerous teaching schools.  He never heard from any of them.

This list by no means exhaustive; at some later date, I’ll write another one of these detailing what not to do when applying for jobs at the Joint Meetings.  Regardless, if you avoid these mistakes, you’ll be in a better position than most, and certainly a better position than I was when I started looking for jobs.

I just discovered that Eszter Hargittai has started a career advice column for academics. It’s called “Ph.Do” and appears at Inside Higher Ed. Here are a couple of quotes lifted from her first column, which should give a flavor:

The pieces I will be writing here in the Ph.Do series are built on the premise that understanding the many implicit practices of academia can be extremely valuable in navigating various stages of the system well.

and for graduate students in particular:

The path to tenure begins in the first year of graduate school.

At the moment she has an introductory post as well as two posts on how to get the most out of academic conferences.

I’ve just begun mentoring a pair of first year graduate students as part of Berkeley’s mentoring program (recently revamped by the student group Unbounded Representation).  Thus, I’ve been recently wondering about the following question:  What is the most important piece of advice for a first year graduate student in mathematics?

I offer my opinion below the fold.  In addition, Adam Boocher, who is a 2nd year graduate student (I’m in my 5th year) will offer his opinion in a companion post on this blog.  We’re also curious to hear from anyone else with an opinion on this question (especially those of you that diagree with us!)

I think that the most important piece of advice for a first-year grad student is this: it’s all about research.  This is a sharp departure from undergraduate mathematics, which is focused on coursework.  Once you understand that research is the priority, this has implications for how you spend your time during your first year.  Here are the main implications that I can think of:

1.  Selecting an advisor is your most important task.  Try to get to know every professor that you might be interested in working with.  This means attending research seminars and tagging along for lunch/dinner/beers afterwards. If your department has teas, you should attend these.  These activities take up time, but they are more important than spending time on homework.

2.  Attend seminars.  I already mentioned this above, but this is also important for getting a sense of the research landscape.  Attending seminars is a painful experience for your first few years of graduate school, but it is nevertheless important.  Professor Ravi Vakil at Stanford has a fabulous webpage of advice, including advice on why/how to attend seminars.  Read his explanation.

3.  Don’t waste time!  When you apply for jobs, you’ll be judged largely based on the research that you’ve done.  Thus, the earlier you start doing research, the more papers you’ll have completed.  Once you’ve settled on an advisor, try to pass your qualifying exams and begin doing research as soon as possible.

4.  Get to know other graduate students, including those older than you.  This can be extremely valuable when you start doing research, since you’ll have friends with expertise in other areas.  My research has benefitted tremendously from conversations with my fellow graduate students, and I have even had the good fortune to collaborate with a couple of them.

It’s that time of year when graduating students have to start thinking about the job search.   I don’t want to give here a comprehensive overview of the job search, but I want to share a few things that I did in my academic job search last year that I think were helpful (and that are not always done)…

1) I kept a spreadsheet of all the jobs I had applied to.  A big one.  With lots of data.  My columns were school, location, deadline, type of job, duration of job, onMathJobs?, special application requirements, where to send application (if not mathjobs), applicationSubmitted?, result of application, faculty member to mention in cover letter, and sendExpandedResearchStatement? (see #2).  This was essential to keeping me organized, especially when applying to on the order of 100 jobs.

2)  I had two major versions of my research statement (for research universities).  One was the standard version, about 4-5 pages.  The other one was an expanded, slightly more technical version, about 8-9 pages, that I sent (unsolicited) to roughly 20 faculty members around the country/world with whom I was particularly interested in working.  Most people, even if they didn’t read it in detail, at least responded to me that they would bring my application to the attention of their search committees (important, when the school is receiving hundreds and hundreds of applications), and I even got a few suggestions on my research.  Thanks to my advisor for this tip.

3)  I applied for the NSF postdoc.  This is only possible if you are a US citizen or permanent resident, and the deadline is October 21st, 2009.   The fellowship provides 2 years of funding with no teaching responsibilities, or 3 years if you teach half-time for 2 of them.  And you can essentially take it wherever you want.  If you do this, you need to apply with a particular sponsor and department, and your sponsor will need to write a short letter.  Word on the street is, with the stimulus package, there will be many of these fellowships available in the near future (more were given last year than usual).  It is definitely worth it to apply, even though the application is lengthy and due early.  After all, after you are done with the NSF application you will have written the bulk of what you need for your other academic job applications.  More information is at www.fastlane.nsf.gov.

Happy job hunting!

–Andrew

Q: There is an extensive list of career advice on your page which I encourage everyone to read. What do you think is the most important piece of advice on your website for young mathematicians?

A: It would depend on the mathematician! For instance, I know some who are very hard working, but don’t ask the type of “dumb” questions that would advance their knowledge nearly as much as they should; and then I know other young mathematicians who are exactly the opposite. But perhaps my favorite piece of advice on those pages isn’t even my own, it is the initial quote by Erica Jong: “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t”.

Ultimately you should follow advice not because someone tells you to, but because it was something that you already knew you should be doing.

Q: As a long time reader of your blog, it’s hard not to notice how productive you are. You seem to get an amazing amount of work done. How many hours a day do you spend doing mathematics as opposed to other things?

A: It varies tremendously from day to day – I look at what I’m scheduled to be doing that day, and the various tasks that I need to get around to (of varying levels of mathematical sophistication), and also examine my own energy levels and motivation, and figure it out from there. I don’t always accomplish what I might initially intend to do, but I usually make progress on something (even if this “something” is just the task of replenishing my own motivation levels). One nice thing about having a blog is that it provides something to do when one wants to do something reasonably sophisticated mathematically (e.g. learn about topic X properly), but doesn’t have the time and energy to really work on an open problem or something. (I usually can’t maintain that level of focused concentration for more than an hour or two at a time anyway.)

But there are definitely some days in which I am too fatigued or caught up in non-mathematical tasks to get much “real” work done. That’s usually a good day to do errands, proofread papers or blog articles, and respond to email
Q: You’ve written that you adapt your work schedule to match your energy levels. What time of day do you find you are most productive at mathematics and why do you think that is?

A: Again, it varies from day to day. Certainly if I give a talk or lecture, or even just a deep conversation, then I tend to be quite tired for several hours afterwards and not really able to do any advanced mathematics. And if I’m distracted or worried by something, then I usually can’t concentrate on maths. Conversely, if I, or one of my coauthors, have just found some interesting thread of an argument that I’m itching to pursue further, then I can often block out everything else and work on it. Other than that, though, I can’t really predict what my energy levels will be at any moment other than the immediate present.

Q: Do you think programming is a helpful skill for a mathematician? If so, which languages do you think are the most useful?

A: Certainly it is useful to know at least one language, so that one can do some rudimentary computations whenever necessary. If one has to do a really large-scale computation, then it’s likely that one would have to learn some customised tools and packages and so no specific prior language background would be particularly useful – rather, a general familiarity with how programming languages work would be more valuable. (Though, for certain specialised subfields of mathematics, specific software packages could be of particular use, of course.)

I also think that there are some useful analogies between writing computer programs and writing mathematical papers; in my pages on writing papers, for instance, I discuss how computer programming philosophies such as encapsulation and information hiding can help one structure a paper in a more reader-friendly manner.

Q: You have collaborators in several fields. What is the most important element to having a successful mathematical collaboration, especially between fields?

A: I feel that collaboration is most productive (and enjoyable) when it arises from a genuine friendship, and not just a business deal. In particular, one should not be worrying too much about how to apportion the credit or the workload for a project, and one should always be trying to communicate one’s own thoughts as clearly as possible to the other collaborators. At least one of my collaborators insists on strictly adhering to the “Hardy-Littlewood rules of collaboration”; with most of my other collaborators, we don’t adhere to these rules to the letter, but we certainly follow the spirit of them in most cases.

Q: One of my professors once said that a big part of mathematics is frustration management. How do you manage your frustration?

A: I tend to have several things to work on at any given time; when I get stuck on one of them (which often happens), I write up how far I managed to get, and turn attention to something else. Also, I have a fair number of things to do which are not as difficult as solving an open problem (e.g. blogging about a known piece of mathematics), so that’s usually a good way to evade frustration. When one comes back to the problem a few months or years later, with some more tricks under one’s belt and a fresh perspective, often one can see a way to make progress that one didn’t see before.

Baby Felix Klein’s family probably didn’t give him lots of useless presents around the holidays, and he turned out okay (aka brilliant mathematician/physicist). All of  the Holiday Sales are already starting, trying to entice all of us poor people to dish out dollars for useless junk. So I thought I’d start a list of mathy gifts under $15 that are sure to please. Everyone knows that mathematicians love to be disoriented — or at least they know that being disoriented is nothing to be ashamed of!  I suppose these might also make good extra credit projects to give your students as well (maybe not the first one).

• Make a Glass Klein Bottle for your favorite mathematician: What’s a Klein Bottle?  Take a cylinder and glue the ends together with opposite orientation. Can’t do it? That’s because it can’t be done in three dimensions without letting the cylinder intersect with itself. Acme Klein Bottles is a company that specializes in beautiful glass Klein Bottles that are, in general, pretty expensive. BUT, the good news is Acme Klein Bottles, there is a $10 option that may appeal to those conservationists/penny-pinchers among us. This “Jigsaw Puzzle” comes with a free band-aid!
• Knit a Klein Bottle Hat to keep those precious brains warm: Seeing as yarn is so much softer than glass, this option may be preferable.  I have not tried this next one, but judging from my minimal knitting skillz, I may stick to the “Mobius Scarf”, which I saw at Oiyi’s Crafts Blog. Mathematician Sarah-Marie Belcastro generously provides instructions at her website for knitting these self-intersecting representations of the Klein Bottle. There is also a link to making hyperbolic baby pants.
• Make a Mobius Music Box for your loved one: I ordered my very own DIY Music Box Kit, and made my own little music box that plays music upside down!  (Just twist the music sheet once first after threading it through the music box as done at This artists site )  It was fun and you can do it too. Take a gander at Think Geek’s ;. AND Note that you can punch your own holes to compose an original backwards\upside down masterpiece. By the way, August Mobius is the namesake of this strip, which was also discovered by a man whose last name was Listing. But which sounds cooler “Listing Strip” or “Mobius Strip”? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
• Make Your Boy (or Girl) a Boy’s Surface: Really, Real Projective Space deserves more recognition here. I mean, it’s disorienting too! Two dimensional real projective space is what you get by taking a sphere and identifying (gluing together) antipodal points (e.g. the north and south pole). Since this space cannot be embedded in three dimensions (try it), we will make do with “Boy’s Surface”, which is an immersion (has self-intersection) just as our models of the Klein Bottle are. This immersion was part of Werner Boy’s 1901 Thesis written under the Famous Mathematician Hilbert. The surface was discovered as a result of Hilbert’s request for Boy to prove that no such immersion existed. Lesson to be learned: Even famously intelligent people can be wrong!  Courtesy of Joe Field’s website, you can use just good old fashioned paper, scissors, and tape to make Boy’s Surface.  This is a truly unusual gift– not nearly as pedestrian as Klein Bottles or Mobius Strips.
• Okay, I’d love to see some other  inexpensive gift ideas — what mathy things have you made?

A lot of the content on this blog is posted when a member of the editorial staff has an idea or remembers a gem of wisdom. If you post a question as a response to this thread, we will happily focus our attention on your current quandary.