By Jake Price
My undergraduate years were spent at Kalamazoo College, a small undergraduate liberal arts college in western Michigan. It gained some acclaim from being featured in Colleges that Change Lives, a book presenting small, student-focused institutions that seemed to be read largely by parents in the late 90s and early 2000s (including my mom). Studying mathematics and physics there was a dream, and I benefited tremendously from the personal relationships I was able to make with my professors. Several times as a student, I was invited to dinners with professors, and once was given a spare ticket to see Yo-Yo Ma perform with the local symphony alongside my professor and his family. Most of all, my professors seemed happy. They loved their students and their jobs. I wanted to do that.
As I moved across the country to Washington to begin my PhD in Applied Mathematics, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I was moving far from home for an indeterminate amount of time, and from a small college to an enormous state school. I had less mathematical experience than many of my fellow students (when asked during the application process why I hadn’t taken PDEs, I had to answer that my school didn’t offer the course!) But I took solace in the fact I would soon be surrounded by other students passionate about teaching mathematics at a college level!
Well, the first year was a big wake-up call. I had gone from one of the strongest students in my major to one of the weakest in our program. And I discovered that, in fact, many of my peers were not aiming to be professors at small colleges! They had aspirations of groundbreaking mathematical research, and they had the brilliance and drive to achieve it. The department was incredibly welcoming, and the tight-knit community reminded me forcefully of my undergraduate experiences. I formed close friendships with my peers, but I couldn’t help but feel I was, if not an imposter, then someone with different goals than many of my colleagues.
After a rocky few years, I eventually came to find that I wasn’t as alone as I thought. I developed friendships with fellow students who dreamed of teaching as much as or more than research, like Jakob Kotas and Jeremy Upsal. Faculty like Bernard Deconinck and Mark Kot listened to my goals, and connected me with opportunities to design and teach mathematics summer camp courses, and eventually to serve as instructor of record in several AMATH courses! As I taught more and more, I eventually formed a reading group dedicated to mathematics pedagogy, and quickly found that to be a highlight of my week. Discussing mathematics teaching with folks like Kelsey Marcinko and Ben Liu pushed me to improve at my passion.
As my graduation loomed, I turned my attention anxiously to the job market. I had been naive - the vast overproduction of PhDs meant I had essentially zero chance of getting a teaching professor job at a liberal arts college, and if I wanted one I needed to prepare myself for an itinerant life of visiting positions or postdocs for at least a few years. To make matters more complicated, I had absolutely fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest and dreamed of staying. I had also just fallen in love with my future wife, who was not eager to uproot her life for someone she had met only a few months prior. It is nothing short of a miracle that one of the jobs posted that year was at the University of Puget Sound: another “college that changes lives,” just down the way in Tacoma, Washington. It was a dream job. The exact sort of job I wanted in the exact place I wanted to live. That doesn’t happen in academia, and certainly not straight from graduate school. Somehow, against all odds, I got the job.
I’ve now been at Puget Sound for six years. Six tumultuous years for the world, for academia specifically, for small tuition-driven colleges extra specifically, for Puget Sound extra extra specifically, and for the math department here extra extra extra specifically. When I joined the department, I was the most junior of seven tenure line faculty. Now, after a pandemic-mediated rash of early retirements and resignations, I am the senior member of our department (before I even got tenure)! In my time here, I have seen just how well UW AMATH set me up for success. I’ve served on and chaired several searches for our department and seen firsthand exactly how unusual it was for a university to give a graduate student the chance to be an instructor of record. I’ve seen how lucky I was to have the trust of the department to develop my own pedagogy without fear of interfering with carefully coordinated classes. Yes, there are a lot of people graduating with PhDs, but they are not all coming from departments that so forcefully support them in pursuing teaching-focused goals. Many cover letters I read make it clear that a fair number of departments are actively hostile towards those goals. I am very lucky I went to UW.
The job at Puget Sound has lived up to my dreams for it, though it came with a whole slew of challenges I didn’t foresee. I teach in small classes of 10-20 students. Each summer, I can have any number of bright young people working on interesting mathematical research projects with me. I’ve made friends with other faculty across the campus in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Politics, English, Religion, and more. The pedagogical conversations across disciplines are rich in a different way than those with other mathematicians. On a small campus, I quickly found myself on a first-name basis with the provost, the deans, even the president. As our department had a major “changing of the guard,” I’ve been invigorated by the opportunity to build an inclusive, pedagogically daring department of young faculty without needing to push against institutional inertia or set-in-their-ways professors. The pandemic hit our university hard, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I have UW AMATH to thank for setting me on the path that brought me here!