By 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 never do it again.

Surprisingly, seventeen years later, at age 34, I finally decided to give calculus another try. I was now married with two kids, and after getting a degree in biology and working in environmental education, I had been a stay-at-home parent for eight years. For a long time my lack of calculus knowledge had nagged at me, and I felt like I should learn it properly. So at the beginning of 2020, after my youngest child started preschool, I decided to take Calculus 1 at the local university.

In high school when there was something I didn’t understand, I ignored it and hoped it would make more sense later. I rarely spoke up in class and never asked questions, especially if it seemed like I was the only one who didn’t know something. Returning to college as an adult, I decided to take the opposite approach and ask every question I could think of. I didn’t want understanding to pass me by and leave me behind again. I also became more active in the way I studied and took notes, finding that writing things down multiple times and rewriting them in my own words helped me to learn and remember them better. Within a few weeks, calculus went from something I dreaded to something I was willing to tolerate, to something I looked forward to every day.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit in the middle of the semester, and everything shut down. My university and my children’s school and daycare were closed. I spent my days keeping my kids entertained at home, and my evenings watching Calculus lecture videos and doing homework. It was an extremely stressful time, but doing math was a relief. During a time when the world was completely unrecognizable and the future was unpredictable, I could immerse myself in a math problem and forget about everything else.

Over the next year, distance learning allowed me to continue taking classes like Linear Algebra and Proofs while my children were also doing remote schooling. Before the pandemic I would never have committed to an on-campus degree program, due to the busyness of managing a household and the frequency of children’s sick days and other time commitments. But now, with the unexpected opportunity to try it out from home, I saw that I was capable of handling more than I’d thought.

I also realized that I couldn’t imagine going back to a life without doing math every day. Math became my refuge, and it was exactly what I needed during the stress of the pandemic. It gave me logic and order amid chaos, beauty and creativity amid grief.

When schools and universities reopened to in-person learning in 2021, I filled my schedule with classes and a math tutoring job. With my children back in school and a full slate of activities, I had to be creative about finding time to do schoolwork. But I really enjoyed talking about math with classmates on campus, and I found that spending more time on math actually gave me more energy for my family. It made me a better problem solver, more creative and resilient, and a more patient mom.

Without that year of distance-learning classes brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, I wouldn’t be pursuing a math degree. The pandemic has also brought other new opportunities: in the past two years I’ve participated in two fully remote summer research programs and an online directed reading program. Through these programs—which only arose because of Covid-19—I’ve been able to meet other math students and professors from around the world, learn about new areas of math, and gain exposure to mathematical research for the first time. Before 2020, opportunities like these were only available at residential programs, which are out of reach for me because of my family responsibilities. I hope that these and other fully remote programs continue to stick around long after the pandemic so they can be available to other nontraditional students and those who are unable to travel.

Despite the many challenges caused by the pandemic, it brought many silver linings that made it possible for me to pursue and participate fully in mathematics. I’m grateful that I started doing math when I did: taking Calculus 1 at the beginning of the pandemic was exactly the right place and the right time. It’s never too late to try something new—or to try something old that you never thought you’d try again.

Alice Mehalek discusses giving calculus a second chance in her thirties, and how the pandemic inspired her to pursue a math degree.