*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 2 Issue 21 June 8, 1994 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY POTENTIALLY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS Please, direct submissions and questions to Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu , editor for the month of June. Next issue: Wednesday, June 22 Editor for May: Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Editor for June: Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Editor for July: To subscribe: Send mail to Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. Table of Contents Item # Title ------ ----- 1 Editor's notes 2 Solon Blundell Reply to Charles Mannix 3 Steve Kennedy Liberal Arts Marketability 4 Greg Gibson Letters of Recommendation 5 Mark Winstead Recall of retired faculty 6 Curtis Bennet Letter to the *Notices* 7 Closing Credits _______________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editor's notes: It is my privilege to be the editor for the *Concerns* for the month of June. We will be sending out the newsletter every two weeks for the summer, due to the decreased activity during the summer. Let me mention again the index to the issues of the *Concerns* which was compiled by Ed Aboufadel (Thanks Ed!!). It is available at the YMN archive site. This issue we have some more discussion on the Charles Mannix's suggestion of distributing coupon books to those in the job market (last issue, Item #3b). We also have a nice article by Steve Kennedy on making yourself more attractive to liberal arts colleges. There is a question on how to get a good letter of recommendation. Also, there is a comment on the practice of "recalling" a retired faculty member to teach and how this might effect the job market. Finally, there is a request for comments on a letter to be sent to the editors of the *Notices* on the AMS's National Policy Statement. Please, keep the conversation going! Franklin Mendivil Georgia Tech mendivil@math.gatech.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item #2 Solon Blundell Reply to Charles Mannix I would like to reply to the suggestion of Charles Mannix concerning the use of "magic bullet" coupons. First, I think the idea has tremendous merit and should should be discussed and modified if necessary. I would also propose the following extension of the idea. Let the professional societies publish a book each September, containing just a vita and cover letter for each applicant. This volume of some 3000 to 6000 pages could be made available electronically to most if not all mathematics departments in the country. The initial contact between an applicant and an employer could then be reduced to simply mailing one of Prof. Mannix's proposed coupons. Upon receiving a coupon, the employer would look up the published vita and request further application materials if interested. Employers could also scan the database and send letters of interest to applicants matching any programmable criterion. Solon F. Blundell fred@math.bu.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item #3 Steve Kennedy Liberal Arts Marketability There has been some discussion recently in this forum about choosing a marketable specialty. If your goal is a position at a liberal arts college, then your field is of little import. But the discussion started me thinking about what a person could do in graduate school to improve their chances of landing a job in a liberal arts college after graduation. The single most important thing you must do in grad- uate school is create a record of effective teaching. When the hiring committee at a liberal arts college reads your dossier the first thing that they look for is proof that you will be a success in the classroom. How to Create a Record of Effective Teaching: First, of course, you must work at becoming an effective teacher--that means being organized and prepared for class or recitation section, including reading the book and trying some of the problems beforehand, treating your students with respect and being understanding of their problems. There are resources for improving your teaching: most universities have pedagogy experts on site with whom you can consult, or will provide student observers to attend your class and discuss what works and what doesn't. Read Steven Krantz's "How to Teach Mathematics." Most university mathematics departments have one or two faculty members who are concerned about teaching--identify that person in your department. Ask him/her to attend your class occasionally and discuss with you your performance. Do this many times over the course of your time in grad school and when you are looking for a job this person will be in a position to write a meaningful, informative letter about your teaching, your growth as a teacher, and your dedication to improving your teaching. I can't stress enough how important it is to have some such documentation. A letter of recommendation from someone who has actually observed your teaching and discussed pedagogy with you is infinitely more impressive than a letter from someone who has only read your student evaluations. Everybody has a letter attesting to the fact that their evaluations "consistently rank them in the top X% of teaching assistants in the university", and almost everybody (it seems) has a teaching award. Consequently, neither of these is particularly impressive anymore. (If you do have a significant teaching award it might be smart to indicate how selective the criteria are for it in your dossier: e.g., "I received the O.I.M. Goode Prize for Teaching Excellence. This prize is awarded annually to three graduate teaching assistants in the College of Arts and Sciences. There are approximately 500 eligible graduate teaching assistants.") It also helps to have taught classes on your own, as opposed to only having been an assistant running recitation sections. If this is not possible at your institution, consider applying for adjunct or summer work at a local two- or four-year college. Document your success there. Be Versatile: Take a variety of courses, read books and journals (including expository ones) and get as much mathematical breadth as possible. Narrow specialization is the antithesis of the liberal arts ideal. You should be willing (and, ideally, eager) to teach almost every course in the department. During the most recent candidate search at my institution the chair of the search committee talked repeatedly of looking for a good "utility infielder." With the exception of statistics and computer science, which are really different disciplines, it is uncommon for a liberal arts school to be seeking a particular field. Most liberal arts colleges have zero or one statistician and many staff their CS courses entirely with mathematicians (for economic reasons: a computer scientist is more expensive than a mathematician). One way to improve your chances at a liberal arts school is to get some formal training in one or both of these disciplines. A department with only one statistician might like the security of having a second body around competent to teach upper-level stats. Make Contacts and Be Informed: Join the AMS and the MAA, read their journals and their newsletters. Know what is happening in your profession. Keep abreast of developments in curricular reform. (I know people who taught reform versions of calculus in grad school and got interviews and jobs based on their experience.) Go to meetings. Give a talk at your sectional MAA meeting. There will be people there from every local college: meet them, remember their names, write to them when you get on the job market. Use any contact you can to get your application noticed. There will be ~1000 applicants for any job you want. The hiring committee physically can not give careful attention to every application. There comes a point where they must be looking for reasons to stop reading an application, just so they can get through the pile. You have to give them a reason to give extra attention to your file. If the person reading your file heard you give a nice talk at an MAA meeting or had lunch with you, that might be all the break you need to get your foot in the door. You need to make your application stand out from the pile. Doing something extra during grad school could be the way to do that. Good luck. Steve Kennedy St. Olaf College kennedy@stolaf.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item #4 Greg Gibson Letters of Recommendation I would like to pose a question concerning letter of recommendation. Recently I received my letters of recommendation back from a place I applied to. They rejected my application because I was in the wrong area. I was surprised by this but did read my letters.( My committee knows of this, since I told them.) I did not tell them, however, that I was a little distressed by these letters. They were on the whole positive but generic. I would not have know that they were about me except that my name was mentioned. Since it now appears that I will not get a job this year, I'm thinking of asking them to rewrite them for next year. Could someone in a position to read letters of recom- mendation post some good, but brief, guidelines on how to write an effective letter of recommendation? One of my committee members asked for a copy of my resume. He then asked questions about what was listed there and mentioned some of my entries in his letter. This certainly helped personalize it. The other two letters , including one from my advisor seemed, as I said, generic. One basically said that 1) I did good work academically. This person was on my committee 2) Achieved some unexpected results 3) gave well organized talks 4) am well liked by my students This letter was supposed to be about teaching. Fortunately I had another teaching recommendation from the coordinator of the TA's. That one is just a form letter saying what I've done and giving the percent of students ranking my fair, good and above average on my last 3 eval- uations. My advisors letter basically was the same as the one detailed above except that it mentioned what my research area was. Recently in a conversation with him, he mentioned that for a theoretical person, Lie algebra, I had an unusual amount of applied work in my background. Double major - Bachelor's math and comp sci.; master's project on error correcting codes and cryptography, PhD - emphasis error in numerical analysis, particularly numerical linear algebra. Should I ask him to mention this in a rewritten letter of recommendation for next year? Finally, any suggestions about how to get more detailed teaching letters of recommendation out of faculty would be appreciated. The above detailed letter pts 1 - 4 , was written by someone who observed me, read my student evaluations for the past 3 semesters, and then wrote me a letter. Maybe I should have suggested that he quote my students evaluations. Some of their comments were quite positive. Any thoughts from others on how to handle letters of recommendation would probably help many of us next year. I'm also looking forward to the results of the job survey. --- Greg Gibson NCSU 1994 gagibson@math.ncsu.edu (ed. For more on letters of recommendation on your teaching, see Steve Kennedy's article, Item #3) _______________________________________________________________ Item 5# Mark Winstead Recall of retired faculty I recently had lunch with a number of mathematicians who work in the University of California system or recently retired from there. I came to find out that the UC system practices something called recalling. It is where a faculty member is allowed to retire, then allowed to come back and teach a usually reduced course load at a reduced salary, but allowed to collect retirement salary from the UC system. Of course, this salary is reduced from what they used to make, but it is still at least as good as a new PhD would make, I am told. It is of course no guarantee that a new hire would be made if this practice were curtailed or eliminated. A faculty member might not retire if he/she didn't expect to be recalled. I just wondered if anyone knew how widespread this practice is. Any opinions on how this effects the job market or the future of academia? Mark W. Winstead winstead@euclid.ucsd.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item 6# Curtis Bennet Letter to *Notices* I am planning on submitting the following letter to the *Notices* of the AMS, I would be happy to add anybody else's signature to the letter when I send it, and if you would like to add your signature to this letter, please send me email at cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu. It would help me if you would include the subject line "signature for letter". To the Editor, We were a little disappointed in the National Policy Statement of the AMS (published in the May/June issue of the *Notices*) as concerns the problems in the job market. While we were glad to see the AMS urging for strong action to be taken concerning the job market, we were disappointed to see the AMS sticking to the tired reasoning that only 2 conditions have led to the problem, those conditions being the retrenchment in academia and the influx of Chinese and Eastern European mathematicians because of political events. However you look at the situation, the 50% increase since 1987-1988 in Ph.D.'s produced annually by this country has helped to create the problems in the job market. We realize this increase happened because of predictions of an impending shortage of Ph.D's. However, many of these predictions were based on flawed assumptions. Hence there would be a crisis in the job market today (lesser but a crisis all the same) regardless of world events. We do not believe a 50% increase in production could have been warranted by any reasonable study. The AMS would do much better to admit to this than to leave it out all together. Omissions like this contribute to the frustration that junior mathematicians feel about the AMS and the job market. These omissions also contribute to the belief among some mathematicians that the AMS is more concerned about protecting the interests of senior mathematicians than in helping junior mathematicians. We realize the AMS leadership does not wish to worsen their position in making arguments for more funding, however, in a statement directed in part at the entire mathematical community, this unwillingness to admit partial responsibility for the job crisis is unfortunate. Thank you, Curtis Bennett _______________________________________________________________ Item #7 Closing Credits The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead winstead@euclid.ucsd.edu Vic Perera vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Stephen Kennedy kennedy@stolaf.edu Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu Frank Arlinghaus frank@math.ysu.edu Matt Hudelson hudelson@math.washington.edu _______________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues