By Zerotti Woods, Mathematician, The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

Ok, let's set the scene. You're a freshly minted professional mathematician. You've graduated, those new letters “Ph.D.” have been officially added to your name, and you have a great job offer. Your job offer is not in academia, but that's ok because, recently, graduate programs have stopped trying to disown you if you choose a career in a place other than academia. Your program even encouraged it! You are on a serious high right now and nothing can bring you down. 

Now, you start your new position but you immediately realize that one thing is missing. How on earth do you build a community in your new environment? In graduate school, even though you did a lot of things in isolation, you still had a community to look to for various things. How do you find new collaborators? How do you know which conferences to go to? Does your job support you going to conferences?  How do you find a good friend to crack a corny math joke with? 

Your friends that are working in academia tell you all about the conferences that they are planning on attending soon. They tell you about the weekly tea and coffee hour. They even tell you about the weird department social with the pizza, cookies, and mathematicians standing around talking about what they are researching or teaching. Your friend might even rant a little about how they don't particularly like the social things that their department hosts. But in your head, you might be thinking that it's better than nothing because it at least gives you some chance to talk about math, get new collaborators, and you may have even made a new friend! Not to mention the conferences: these are the places where you get to hang out with all of your math friends and do math things!

In graduate school, there were seminars and talks about how to build your community, but you realize that those talks were geared towards people who will work in academia! This seems to be a weird oversight since a third of all professional mathematicians work for the federal government, not academic institutions! So, if you're a person that likes community, how do you build one when you're not in academia? This question is especially important for under-represented people. The feelings of isolation will always be present, but not having like-minded people to talk to from time to time would only make this worse.

To be clear, many employers outside of academia do a great job at trying to harness an inclusive and collaborative work environment. We can not look over this. But there is always a big difference between your colleagues and your mathematical village. In graduate school, you didn’t have to choose! The shared struggle that happens between cohort members in graduate school builds a bond that nurtures friendships between current and future collaborators. This is not necessarily true in the workforce. Your colleagues are not necessarily your friends or a part of your mathematical community and vice versa. This transition is something that many of us might mourn. It’s hard to hang out with a fifty-something-year-old white guy that is on your team because you might not have that much in common. To make things a bit more complicated, it is known that you are taking a risk intertwining friends and colleagues. These types of relationships require a great deal of trust. This is especially true for underrepresented minorities and becomes even more complicated when you fit in more than one underrepresented group (women of color, LGBTQ+ person of color, etc). These types of relationships require us as well as other people to change. It requires people other than us to think about themselves and their interactions with people who don’t look like them. The fifty-something-year-old white guy probably has power over the younger colleague even if it isn’t direct. He is probably more advanced professionally and has influence that could be good or detrimental to the younger colleague. 

Ok, enough with the ranting. Let’s think of some solutions. In many government and industry research jobs, there are still many conferences that are available to attend. These are great opportunities to build professional relationships. Maybe a good idea is to find out if your job will sponsor going to the conferences if they align with your work or research. There are also many conferences that you heard of in graduate school that still apply. The National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) is a great place to search for many conferences that are targeted for minority mathematicians. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematicians (SIAM), Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB), and Special Interest Groups of the MAA (SIGMAA) are great places to look for conferences that are targeted to the applied mathematics community.

Social media has also been able to make people more accessible. Many blogs, Facebook groups, and other similar things have made networking and socializing much easier. Social media also helps with keeping up with old math friends.

Some employers host social events. Maybe your next really good friend comes from the job social over food that is slightly better than pizza and cookies. The fifty-something-year-old white guy might actually be cool to talk to. If he is more senior, he might also be a person who could show you the ropes and give you insight about what working in your field is like. There are risks and rewards to opening yourself up to friendships at work. It requires a level of trust that needs to be earned. But opening yourself to this may have many benefits that could welcome a great new friend, colleague, or both!

Community and collaboration are really important, especially for new hires. Mathematicians get the reputation of being isolated, but in our opinion, this is changing. Sometimes we don’t think about community for people outside of academia, but this is a mistake. Our community should include mathematicians both inside and outside of academia. I am sure that I have overlooked many ways to build community, and we need to talk about this more as a mathematical community to get more ideas. Maybe we could have more discussions about this on social media, conferences, and maybe even more conversation about it in the workplace. Hopefully we can begin this discussion soon.