A month ago, I wrote up a post on the history of gravity and quantum phenomena. I noted that if I were to try to tell the same story without mentioning any men, I’d write about Hypatia of Alexandria, Emile du Chatelet, Sophie Germain, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Mileva Maric, and Emmy Noether. I had planned to do that here, but instead, I’d rather invite you to consider this anecdote from a man reflecting on the least impressive PhD candidates he had seen during his doctoral work.
Strictly in terms of their application, I imagine one of the least impressive PhD applicants I’ve seen was a guy named Brandt Kronholm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing (and using this guy’s name, no less) to knock him. (Brandt, if you see this, drop me a line!) It’s just that he applied to the PhD program in math at my school, and he came with an extremely light math background.
In fact, his first degree was in literature. Somewhere along the way to getting his master’s in literature, he got interested in mathematics. He definitely took some math course work, but I don’t even remember if he got an undergraduate math degree prior to applying to the PhD program.
He made it through. I think he joined the program in 2001, and graduated in 2010 or so. But that long delay involved extenuating circumstances… I think his advisor left at a very inconvenient point for him. Perhaps as a condition to admission, I recall he took some undergraduate math courses during his first year of graduate school.
But don’t get me wrong, he’s a smart and hardworking guy. His intelligence and work ethic were not “unimpressive.” It’s just that he came from a very nonstandard background, which was certainly not “impressive” in any traditional sense.
Now, if we’re talking “least impressive PhD applicant” from a personal sense, and not necessarily based on their credentials, then I won’t go so far as to out her by name. But she had some very strange ideas about math that just screamed “unimpressive.”
I formed my first opinion of her in an analytic number theory class we were both taking. One of the problem sets involved proving a bunch of stuff with the gamma function.
If you don’t know the gamma function, it occupies kind of a funny place in mathematics. It’s by no means obscure, but at the same time it’s not so important as to warrant its own course. At most, it might get a dedicated moment or two in some course or another. But that’s about it.
And that’s about all you need. For our problem set, the professor gave us a definition of the gamma function that made our problems pretty straightforward. Nonetheless, this girl flipped out. “The gamma function? The GAMMA function!? This was not in the list of prerequisites for the class! I have not had a class on the gamma function, and I think it’s ridiculous that I should be expected to solve homework problems involving it!”
It’s sort of the mathematical equivalent of being livid that you have to cut your own steak at a restaurant.
I want to characterize this part of her personality as immature, but it’s a certain kind of immaturity. It’s mathematical immaturity. It reflects the idea that one is helpless to learn anything on their own, and that one’s whole mathematical development should occur only on a carefully planned script, dished out in bite-sized pieces.
But she muddled through too.
I after reading this, I felt it appropriate to reply:
The fact that you felt so judgmental about the young woman in your class nicely illustrates how difficult it is for some women to be accepted by groups of men.
In a group of women, complaining about silly things is how we bond. We don’t use a complaint as an opportunity to pass judgment on one another. Women show weakness to one another in order to be friendly and establish commiseration, but when a woman does this in a group of men, she is judged as weak. It is difficult to be surrounded by a group of people who have been socialized in a completely different way.
To clarify, this wasn’t a mere complaint. This wasn’t “sheesh, these problem sets are hard” or “ugh, I hate the gamma function.” This was level 10 righteous indignation. This was “he [the professor] owes us all an apology! I will complain to the department chair, all the way up to the university president if need be! He’ll be lucky to keep his job!”
Let’s take gender out of it. I see you have a physics background and spent time in academia. How would you respond to a first year graduate student (of unspecified gender) who strenuously complains to you that a homework problem is inappropriate because it involves a concept that was not listed as a prerequisite to your course, when in fact an adequate description of that concept appears in the problem itself? For concreteness, let’s say it’s a mechanics course and one of the problems involves computing the trajectory of a particle given its jerk and some initial conditions. Jerk is defined in the problem as the time derivative of acceleration.
I think you missed/illustrated my point
Care to try to re-state it?
It is hard for some people to be accepted by groups of men who don’t pick up on certain types of social cues.
Okay. Besides whatever other social cues may or may not have been given or picked up on, are you saying calling for the job of a tenured professor because he gave a hard homework problem is a proportionate or appropriate reaction? Does your answer change if you don’t regard the homework problem as hard, and in fact regard it to be easy for someone at that level of education?
With all due respect, it seems like you’re going out of your way to find facts that aren’t there during an event that you were not present for.
Sure, maybe I didn’t understand her sense of humor. But I assure you, it was clear that she was not joking and was not kidding. It was clear at the time she made those statements, and that conclusion was only bolstered by the way she comported herself during the two subsequent years I spent in her company. With all stories like this, it helps to have been there.
And, as someone who was there, reactions like yours frustrate me. You lament how hard it is for women to operate in a group of men. I lament how easily and with such apparently firm conviction you identify errors in my story. As if I can’t tell the difference between an innocuous complaint made to bond and someone who “flipped out,” and was “livid” with “righteous indignation.”
I’ll admit to missing a social cue here and there, but do you really think that I’m so oblivious as to mistake a casual joke with a flip-out? Without knowing hardly anything about me or her, is it somehow so much more likely in your judgment that I misread the situation (rather than this person actually being inappropriately perturbed) as to warrant your lament?
I don’t think it is. I think your reaction is suggestive of something else.
When you go out of your way to provide your personal anecdote comparing an unqualified yet capable young man to a qualified yet incapable young woman who ‘flipped out’, I take issue with what you are trying to achieve.
On more than one occasion, I have seen men in STEM make fun of women colleagues over ‘flipping out’ and you seemed to be exemplifying this trend.
Adding insult to injury when someone is struggling is called bullying and when you are in the majority, you should be especially aware when you are doing it.
I’m not sure I went out of my way. I think my two stories are responsive to the question. And they aren’t so much foils for each other, as they are individually responsive to different interpretations of the question. The question asks about a “least impressive” person. That could mean either least impressive on paper, or least impressive in execution. I simply answered both, as I often do with questions that require interpretation.
I get that you have seen men in STEM make fun of women colleagues for “flipping out.” You don’t say it, but I assume you didn’t always agree with the “flip out” characterization. In the situations you witnessed first hand, I further assume your disagreement is based on first hand information you witnessed.
But here, you lack that first hand information. So instead, you appear to condemn me based on the behavior of other “men in STEM.” In fact, you do even worse: you seem to minimize the first-hand account I provided. (I didn’t say it in my main answer, but the speech I wrote for her is pretty close to a verbatim quote. It’s abbreviated, however. Her rant went on from the end of class, all the way back to our shared office in a different building, and then some. Certainly in excess of five minutes.)
On the assumption my quotes were accurate and her statements were sincere (and not jokes), how would you characterize what she said? Was in an appropriate response?
I think that your first hand accounts are nothing more than sexist stereotypes hiding behind the guise of innocent anecdote.
If you come to that conclusion knowing essentially nothing about me and nothing about the person of the story, I think you’re operating with an entirely different set of stereotypes.
Last word’s yours if you want it.
Kirsten Hacker 