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Noelle Sawyer

Math PhD Candidate 

What do you do?

I am a PhD candidate in Math at Wesleyan University. I spend a lot of my day learning as much math as possible. I just choose an advisor a couple of months ago, so now I’m reading about Riemannian geometry. I [chose to study] geometry and dynamics because I really love pictures but I also really love analysis and this is at the intersection of both of those. I’m also teaching my first class this semester as part of the program. I’ve taught summer school before and I’ve done a lot of tutoring but now I’m teach an intro calculus class. It’s the second semester of calculus for people who don’t really plan on being math majors. I really like to teach so I’ve just been waiting for this moment. I’ve been waiting for them to give me a class so I can stand up and explain math to people. I love it.

What do you hope to do with your math PhD? 

I would like to be a math professor and also do math research. So basically, I want to continue doing math and teaching people math forever.

Do you remember the moment you realized you liked Math and when you wanted to pursue it as a career?

The moment I decided I wanted to do math in undergrad was when I had a physicist moonlighting as a math teacher. I’d been pretty good at math but I don’t know if I thought it was interesting until I had this teacher in grade 11 who getting a physics grad degree and was taking a year or 2 off. He started giving us a bunch of problems that were about spaceships and rockets and fun applied things. At that point I realized, you can actually use math to do things and I suddenly became much more interested.

I decided I wanted to pursue it as a career around the same time. I make my mind up pretty solidly so when I decided I was going to do it in undergrad, I pretty much decided that I was going to do it forever. I didn’t know in what form but I knew I wanted to do something with math from that moment.

What is a challenge you have faced in your field and how did you handle it?

One thing that was a challenge for me early on was that I didn’t have the same math background as a lot of people going into undergrad. The Bahamian school setup is different from American schools. All of the classes everyone had taken [in high school], I hadn’t necessarily taken them. I didn’t have the same little tricks and course knowledge as everyone else. So, my first semester of math was just me playing catch up. I had to stay up really late at night with my textbooks because they kept assuming I knew things that I didn’t. I spent a lot of time at office hours and TA sessions and put in a lot of elbow grease working on the textbooks late at night. It was a blow early on in the dreams of being a mathematician but I made it through that semester and it’s pretty much been up from there I would say.

How is the Bahamian school system different from the American school system?

We don’t have a separation of math classes, you just do math. I didn’t have any calculus or formal pre-calculus classes. I learned how to take derivatives and basic things about matrices. I also had a little linear algebra which I find people here don’t really have. I also became really good at doing math without a calculator because up until a certain point we didn’t have calculators so you had to know how to do things by hand. Up to this point I have never owned a graphing calculator and I think that’s served me pretty well.

What makes you an asset in your current position?

I’m an asset because I’m very adaptable. I’ve had to learn how to adjust to new and unfamiliar situations because I’m not from here and I don’t look like everyone else around me. When I don’t understand what’s going on with math or if I have to go to conferences or deal with new people that’s not new for me. I have to be good at handling people and situations. It makes me good at information gathering and networking.

To go off that I feel as black women we tend to be more observant of the situations we are in and we read the room a little closer than other people do because we don’t want to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations.

We get into enough [uncomfortable situations] not on purpose so why would I purposely fling myself into one. I was just having this conversation with a friend and we were talking about if you look around a room and you look at the black people they’re always staring around at everybody else. They’re doing what they’re doing, but they are clearly observing the room around them. White people seem to rarely do that. They seem to be focusing on what is happening right there in front of their eyes.

What’s your favorite memory or proudest moment in your career?

Recently I had to retake my qualifying exams, which generally you take after your first year in a PhD program. I ended up in a situation where I needed to retake all of them after my second year and I passed. People failing the exams is not really abnormal, but people needing to retake all of them and then passing is. Apparently, I am the first person to do that in 7 years. It’s kind of a bright spot blooming out of failure. It could be argued maybe I shouldn’t have failed them in the first place but I failed and bounced back really hard core and now I doing really well. That’s been driving me for the last year.

At your job are you often the only woman of color in the room? If so how does that make you feel and how do you deal with that?

Yes, I am often the only woman of color in the room. More specifically I am the only black woman in the room. It’s not fun at all, I don’t like it and I want more black women around me all the time. I don’t feel settled when I look around and there are no black women nearby. Math is statically a bunch of old white men. Having anybody around who is not an old white man makes me feel more comfortable but not completely comfortable. Having women of color around adds to my comfort level but when they are not around I just have to settle in and think to myself hopefully I am paving the way for more people like me in the future so they won’t have to feel like this. I would like if somebody didn’t have to think about the fact that they were the only black woman in the room. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that erased from one of your problems? I deal with it by hunkering down and hoping that it rights itself somehow. Me being in the program is evidence that things are getting better but I would like them to be better than they are now.

Are they letting in any new black people in this coming class?

I’m not sure yet. My program is 17 people and right now I find it doubtful that they will let another black person in. For a program of our size we are diverse. For me to be here we are skewing the statistics wildly. You kind of have to hunt for black people to let them in. When they’re hiring [faculty], they have to put in a special effort to recruit females and people of color job applicants because otherwise all the applications they get will be overwhelmingly white and male. They were doing that in the hiring process but I don’t know how that works for grad school applications. I know they’re putting a good foot forward in hiring but I’m not sure how that translates over to the grad students.

What advice do you have for other women of color who want to pursue your career?

I would say you should start really early in undergrad making connections with professors. If there are not many professors of color or women still put in the effort. Try to make connections because these connections will follow you through the rest of your career. They can write you really excellent recommendation letters, help you figure out how to get just the right resume for grad school or help you make connections with their colleagues in graduate programs. They can also be helpful in getting through undergrad. Having that one professor whose office you can go and sit in is beneficial and they can become your emotional support. Hold on to that connection.

When you get to grad school, take up as much space as possible because sometimes you’re going to feel like as a woman and as a person of color together you don’t deserve to take up as much space or that the spaces are clearly not created for you, but it doesn’t matter. Take up as much space as possible, be very visible, look everyone in the eye, get involved in things you want to get involved in and be vocal. Maybe they’ll call you loud but you’re there and that department is your house. Just make sure they know that you belong and you know you belong. Maybe you’ll have imposter syndrome but as far as everyone else is concerned you are comfortable and they have to become comfortable with you being there.

What do you think we as women in STEM can do to get more women of color involved in STEM?

I think that we have to be very welcoming to women of color we see in our paths. Whether they are undergrads or someone visiting your lab. We have to be friendly and welcoming to them because maybe the institution is not but you have to let them know that there is a space available to them and if they show up they’ll meet people like you. We also have to do some work badgering our chairs of departments, professors and supervisors by asking what they are doing to ensure that in this applicant pool we’re getting some women of color. We have to make sure they notice that something is overwhelmingly white or something is overwhelmingly male. White men don’t notice when there are only white men in the room, it’s normal for them. You have to make them realize that shouldn’t be the standard. I think doing those two things can do a lot for encouraging or just creating paths for women of color in STEM.