Math and Mentorship

The Math Department held its annual Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium yesterday in celebration of MLK Jr. Day, featuring University of Colorado Professor James H. Curry lecturing on “Mentoring in the Mathematical Sciences: Good intentions are not enough.”

Most of the talk focused on his really cool current research about image search techniques – taking images as a set of pixels, arranging those pixels into a matrix, and then figuring out ways to factor that matrix into other matrices – perhaps allowing for improved “search by image” algorithms. The best example of the implications I can think of would be Google Search by Image.

Despite the heavy math-based content of the lecture, Professor Curry did talk about the importance of encouraging students to just “do more math” no matter where they’re at skill-wise or what they’re studying. He shared his personal story of being constantly pushed by math teachers throughout his career as a high school student in Oakland, California, and later as a student at UC-Berkeley. As the Chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, he participates in and supports mentoring based programs with the intention of encouraging more students into graduate school.

An audience member asked how he encourages his Department members to take up the mentoring of students when the field of math, like many other STEM fields, is often characterized as the race for research grants and paper publications. Professor Curry responded by saying the Department needs to reward a diverse set of faculty pursuits beyond the competitive fame-accruing, more common measures of success. Despite the esteem of Professor Curry’s work as a leader in math mentorship, I found his response really individualistic and hardly replicable. I acknowledge that he probably has a more explicit set of initiatives to re-engineer the culture of a math department to promote mentorship, yet I found my curiosity revolving around the question: “is Professor Curry – implicating his specific set of experiences – intrinsically necessary to the success of the math mentorship programs he runs?”

I really think so. I think the value of mentorship to any given STEM Department at any given college is defined by the context of how necessary/influential mentorship and encouragement were to the success of the faculty running that department. I don’t feel comfortable making assertions about the implications this idea might have for STEM programs/faculty at specific universities, but I do think this begs for an analysis via race and gender relations. There are not a whole lot of tenured womyn in most STEM fields, nor racial diversity. I’m curious about what this means for mentorship in math. There are studies that imply same-sex mentorship relationships may be key to success. How much do you think race and gender impact mentorship programs? In what ways?

By: Lexie Tourek

(Photo courtesy of sxc.hu)