*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 2 Issue 26 August 17, 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 Kevin Madigan km9985@math.albany.edu , editor for the month of August. Next issue: Wednesday, August 31 Editor for June: Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Editor for July: Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Editor for August: Kevin Madigan km9985@math.albany.edu Editor for September: Bob Dobrow dobrow@cam.nist.gov 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 Curtis Bennett NSF Postdocs/Grants 3 Bob Bruner Response to *Concerns*, Vol. 2, no. 25 4 Ed Aboufadel Big NSF Grant Goes to Differential Geometer 5 Ed Aboufadel Society for Mathematical Biology Committee on Employment 6 Curtis Bennett Employment Survey Results, Part 1 7 Closing Credits __________________________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editor's notes Just a reminder that we are still on our summer schedule of one issue every 2 weeks. The next issue will be August 31. I don't anything to say this week, so I won't say anything. Enjoy this issue of Concerns. Kevin Madigan km9985@math.albany.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Item #2 Curtis Bennett NSF postdocs/grants This is in response to the question raised by Kevin Madigan about applying for NSF postdoctoral fellowships in last week's issue (Vol.2, #25) of the Concerns. It is completely appropriate to apply for an NSF postdoc even if a previous year's proposal has been rejected. I believe you would find that many NSF postdocs are granted to precisely these people. There are a few things, however, that you should think about before doing so. 1) It is probably pointless to submit exactly the same proposal as the year before. If it was rejected once, odds are that it will be rejected again. If your proposal is only a little different, ask for help from senior faculty in rewriting your proposal. In particular, get help from people who routinely review grant proposals. Just like mathematical papers, how the proposal is written will have a major effect on whether it is accepted. 2) If you will be continuing as faculty at your current institution for another year, consider applying for NSF summer support. You shouldn't expect to be successful though. If you are successful, great. Otherwise, you will receive a copy of what the reviewers had to say about your proposal. This will help you write a better NSF postdoc proposal the following year. 3) Consider your letter writers very carefully. If you can get letters from good mathematicians at several universities all of whom know (and think highly of) your research, it will help tremendously. 4) Spend a lot of time explaining what you have already done, and why you expect to be able to do what you propose to do. Reviewers want to know that there is some reason to expect success. That doesn't mean you fail if you don't succeed. After all, part of the joy of mathematics is that you don't always know what can be done and what can't be done. 5) Take a look at the NSF Postdoc proposals on file. At last count we have four on file. I am hopeful, that some of you out there will send in your successful proposals to increase this number. (Send them to me at cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu). These files will give you some idea about how others have been successful. One brief comment. To the best of my knowledge, of these four, two were succesful grants from people who were rejected the first time they applied for an NSF postdoc. (I certainly am one of them.) Whenever I write a grant proposal, I expect to be rejected the first time. This rejection, however, can be a learning experience if you receive feedback. Unfortunately, there is no feedback on NSF postdoc proposals. Thus, you need to get your own responses from senior mathematicians. Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Item #3 Bob Bruner Response to *Concerns*, Vol. 2 no. 25 Regarding Duren's proposed DAS degree and concomitant reorganization of Universities: The overspecialization and lack of interaction between disciplines I experience as a university professor is very irritating to me. I would much prefer an environment in which people from different departments regularly exchange ideas. The reorganization Duren proposes might help in this regard. I periodically consider looking for a job at a college rather than a university exactly because of this. Regarding reapplication for an NSF Postdoc: I came along a tad late for these, so don't know about any special protocol that applies to them in particular, rather than grants in general, but I see no reason why you shouldn't reapply. After all, you may have produced new results since the first application was rejected, and even the results you already had at the time of the first application may be better known and/or appreciated at the time of the second application. While I'm writing, let me wholeheartedly support confidentiality of recommendation letters. The urge to make them public is part of a general tendency our society has to ban whole classes of behavior (e.g., confidential letters of recommendation) whenever an abuse surfaces in that class. For (a much more trivial) example: when we take our dogs with us to go hiking in the state parks, we are officially supposed to keep them on a 6 foot leash. Presumably this is supposed to prevent the odd dog attack on humans or other dogs, but what it really prevents is the dogs being able to run (we certainly can't run as fast as they do). Ironically, the dogs who do create problems for others are generally owned by people who don't bother to obey the rules anyway, so the regulation fails completely to accomplish this purpose. (Of course, there is another possible purpose: to keep them from terrorizing the wildlife, and this seems a valid reason to extend the regulation to all dogs, so perhaps this isn't an example.) The general principle seems to stem from a lawyerly attitude to the world, to wit, guard the truth jealously so that it can't be used against you, as opposed to a mathematician's attitude, which is to start from the truth and accept the consequences. So we get mealy mouthed letters which won't offend anyone, and as a result say nothing. Finally, a proposal a friend of mine made to help relieve the enormous pressure people are under to get grants: eliminate overhead! Bob Bruner rrb@math.wayne.edu __________________________________________________________________________ Item #4 Ed Aboufadel Big NSF Grant goes to Differential Geometer Is the Title of "Second Best Geometer" Still Available? (from the May 6, 1994 issue of Science) Theoretical mathematicians sometimes must scrape by with only pennies for their thoughts. But not Gang Tian, a 35-year-old specialist in differential geometry at the Courant Institute. Tian has just won $500,000 over 3 years from the NSF, more than enough money to oil the only research tool he needs -- his brain. Earlier this week NSF announced that Tian has won the agency's biggest prize: The Alan T. Waterman Award for young scientists. For scientists in other fields, a cool half million might barely cover equipment costs. But for Tian -- whom the head of NSF's math division, Fred Wan, calls "possibly the best geometer of his generation" -- the money is an embarassment of riches. Tian already has a regular NSF grant, which pays him $25,000 a year for five years, and he's completing a Sloan fellowship of $30,000 over 2 years. That's enough to cover the scant computing time Tian requries, as well as his travel costs to math conferences. So how does Tian plan to spend his award? On a 24-carat gold protractor? [Ed: ha ha ha -- not!] No, Tian sys he'll use most of the money to hire postdocs to explore mathematical questions he doesn't have time for. [Ed: Hmm, a few more awards like this, and we can solve the employment crisis in mathematics! Seriously, congratulations to Dr. Tian!] __________________________________________________________________________ Item #5 Ed Aboufadel Society for Mathematical Biology Committee on Employment This was published in the YSN Digest late June, from Jay Banks. Society for Mathematical Biology Committee on Employment The President of the Society for Mathematical Biology, John Tyson, has convened an ad hoc committee to advise the Society on how to enhance job opportunities for new and recent graduates with interest in Mathematical Biology and Biomathematics. Please feel free to contact the members of the committee with your ideas and suggestions and especially your help. Committee members are: Leon Glass (glass@krylov.cnd.mcgill.ca), chair Leah Edelstein-Keshet (keshet@math.ubc.ca) Ray Mejia (ray@helix.nih.gov) Ramit Mehr-Grossman (ramit@goshawk.lanl.gov) John Tyson (tyson@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu), ex officio. __________________________________________________________________________ Item #6 Curtis Bennett Employment Survey Results, Part 1 I have finally completed tallying the results of the employment survey I conducted through the Concerns from 5/10 - 6/30. In this article I will include the raw data concerning how many applicants had found positions when they responded and what type of positions they were. Additionally, I will include the spectrum of the number of applications sent out by individuals. Below the data, I will then discuss the results. Later articles will discuss comments that people made and perhaps analyze other parts of the data that was collected. Survey Results Grad Students Post Graduate total Responses 41 48 89 Found a position 29 38 67 Type of pos. tenure track 11 18 29 2+ year 7 6 13 1 year 9 13 22 other 2 1 3 #of applications found job didn't found job didn't 0-30 6 2 4 4 16 31-60 3 2 15 3 23 61-90 7 3 13 1 24 91-120 9 5 2 0 16 121-175 3 0 1 1 5 175 - 1 0 3 1 5 mercy position received 1 In tabulating the data, I tried to stay fairly close to what people reported of themselves. Occassionally this may have caused me to put responses in the wrong category. Also, it was unclear with me what I should do with so-called "mercy positions" (ie. those positions given by the host institution to graduates who don't find jobs or extensions of jobs by working around the bureaucratic system). The 1-year position numbers are a little off because if someone had a 1-year position AND a two year position for afterwards (as is not uncommon for people going to MSRI (Math Science Research Institute) or IAS (the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton) I put these people into the 2+ year category. Also, some 1-year positions are renewable and some are not. As it was, I was unable to differentiate on all responses. Another comment concerns the peopl who sent out very few applications. Many (but not all) of these people were involved in 2-body problems or had other reasons for restricting the search. Of course, this survey is completely unscientific, and probably should not be used to make sweeping generalizations. There are two items that probably will shift the data in opposite ways. First, offers are still occassionally being made. As a result, some of those who didn't find a job probably now have one (be it only a mercy position). Second, people were probably more likely to respond if they had received an offer. Particularly if they were still waiting on a couple of letters or phone calls. That being said, I found the numbers surprisingly bleak. To see that roughly one fourth of the respondents didn't have any offers (even of 1-year positions) by mid-may was discouraging. Particularly, as I expect that people without offers were less likely to respond. I also was concerned that roughly one third of the offers that had been made by late May were 1-year positions. I hope that the picture is this bleak only because of the early nature of the survey and its lack of random sampling, but I am afraid that is not the case. While the AMS studies usually show fuller employment than this study, there have been questions raised about the AMS study. First, if you get a mercy position at your graduate institution, it usually counts as employment at a Type I school in the study. Second, the AMS study does not count graduate students who extend their graduate study a year. Finally, the AMS study only counts graduate students and does not figure in the postgraduate applicants. I would like to see the AMS or the JCEO do a new study in addition to the current study and the long term study that will soon be coming out. I would like to see the AMS take a "generic" university (or maybe a random sampling of universities) and talk to all of the people who applied to that school (or a random sample of the applicants) and see what happened to those applicants. This certainly will not be a good random sample (although the parenthetical might), but it should give a clearer picture of who is applying for positions, and how those people are doing. Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu ____________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Item #7 Closing Credits The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead mwwinst@gcr.com Frank Sottile sottile@math.toronto.edu Vic Perera vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Kevin Madigan km9985@math.albany.edu Steve Kennedy skennedy@mathcs.carleton.edu Matt Hudelson hudelson@math.washington.edu Bob Dobrow dobrow@cam.nist.gov Lyle Cochran 74443.3055@compuserve.com Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Wendy Brunzie brunzie@turing.ucdavis.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Frank Arlinghaus frank@math.ysu.edu Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu _______________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues