mathbabe

Last night I was waiting for a bus to go hang with my Athena Mastermind group, which consists of a bunch of very cool Barnard student entrepreneurs and their would-be role models (I say would-be because, although we role models are also very cool, I often think the students are role modeling for us).

As I was waiting at the bus stop, I overheard two women talking about the new Applied Data Science class that just started at Columbia, which is being taught by Ian Langmore, Daniel Krasner and Chang She. I knew about this class because Ian came to advertise it last semester in Rachel Schutt’s Intro to Data Science class which I blogged. One of the women at the bus stop had been in Rachel’s class and the other is in Ian’s.

Turns out I just love overhearing nerd girls talking data science at the bus stop. Don’t you??

And to top off the nerd girl experience, I’m on my way today to Nebraska to give a talk to a bunch of undergraduate women in math about what they can do with math outside of academia. I’m planning it to be an informative talk, but that’s really just cover to its real goal, which is to give a pep talk.

My experience talking to young women in math, at least when they are grad students, is that they respond viscerally to encouragement, even if it’s vague. I can actually see their egos inflate in the audience as I speak, and that’s a good thing, that’s why I’m there.

As a community, I’ve realized, nerd girls going through grad school are virtually starved for positive feedback, and so my job is pretty clear cut: I’m going to tell them how awesome they are and answer their questions about what it’s like in the “real world” and then go back to telling them how awesome they are.

By the end they sit a bit straighter and smile a bit more after I’m done, after I’ve told them, or reminded them at least, how much power they have as nerd girls – how many options they have, and how they don’t have to be risk-averse, and how they never need to apologize.

Tomorrow my audience is undergraduates, which is a bit trickier, since as an undergrad you still get consistent feedback in the form of grades. So I will tailor my information as well as my encouragement a bit, and try not to make grad school sound too scary, because I do think that getting a Ph.D. is still a huge deal. Comment below if you have suggestions for my talk, please!