1 Introduction

I love my job.

As Executive Director of the Association for Women in Mathematics, I get to support and celebrate women across the career spectrum individually with programming, prizes, grant opportunities, and collectively with activities that promote institutional change. I empower volunteers to direct their efforts toward projects that personally or professionally advance their careers and passions. I develop strategic initiatives to address the social problems surrounding the advancement of women in mathematics. And I constantly meet inspirational people at every stage of their careers.

In mathematics, the gold standard for a successful career has been a tenure-track job at a research institution with a light teaching load. We are raised and trained by our PhD or master’s advisors who are exactly in such positions and often groom us to reach similar positions. This inherited value system of what matters in math had unjustifiably narrowed my perceived career paths and distorted my own measures of success. The result was that I consistently undervalued my worth and abilities outside of research mathematics early on in my career.

This perspective on careers (and on the mythical “right” career) is something I have internally fought as I traipsed back and forth across the country and around the world. Along the way, I built a unique skill set that is authentic to me. Most importantly, I was aware of my growth, and that consciousness allowed me to seek out jobs that a younger me would have assumed were out of my scope or unattainable to me. My own unconventional career emphasizes that careers don’t have to be trajectories, that there is no single “right” starting place, and that one can be a mathematician across academia, government, business, industry, and the nonprofit sector. So how did I start my own unconventional career? By saying yes to the most unconventional opportunity: bull riding.

2 The Not-so-Typical Start to a Math Career

I came to the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) for an undergraduate degree in mathematics on a pretty non-traditional path: by joining the men’s rodeo team. Sometimes, when I say it out loud, it sounds silly, but—at that time and based on my current 19-year-old experiences—I felt it was the right decision for me.

I grew up training and showing horses to make money in the summers. I actually started college at Saint Mary’s (the all-women’s sister-school of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana), just as Notre Dame was starting a rodeo team. I didn’t know anything about rodeo, but I joined thinking I would ride saddle broncs. Through a series of unexpected events, I got unceremoniously ushered into bull riding.

I pursued bull riding on my own for another year, competing in a handful of rodeos, including one at UTM. It was then that I decided I needed to get some professional help for my bull riding addiction. Since UTM had and has a national championship rodeo program, I decided to transfer there in my sophomore year. I don’t exactly remember, but I think the conversation with my parents went something like:

Mom, Dad, I want to leave my full-ride academic scholarship at a private women’s university to attend a school you have never heard of, in a state you have never visited, to pursue something I am not very good at.Footnote 1

I may be creatively paraphrasing, but what I heard my parents say was: “Karoline, that is the smartest decision you have ever made.” And it turns out they were right.

I was the first woman to compete in Bull Riding in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association (NIRA) Eastern region, the first woman nationally to complete a full year and to compete for subsequent seasons in Bull Riding in NIRA. I also joined the Professional Women’s Rodeo Association and won Rookie of the Year for Bull Riding and Bareback Broncs in 2001. This meant driving cross-country on long weekends and school holidays to compete in rodeos, while completing my major in math and a minor in physics with a perfect GPA and working in the UTM Math Tutoring Lab. (I didn’t tell my rodeo friends I did math, and I didn’t talk to my math friends about rodeo. They just seemed like two separate crowds.)

During my college rodeo career, my riding drastically improved and the small victories I had when competing—when I simultaneously knew what I was supposed to do and was able to execute the move—were some of the most rewarding moments. I competed for “personal bests” but was never great and there was no clear path in rodeo for me past college.

Unconventional paths can be lonely: you may not have peers or mentors and there is never an obvious plan for next steps. Rather, it feels like you are walking at night on a dark path with a weak flashlight. You only can see a few steps in front of you. You know there is risk, but you just have to keep walking to see what is next. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see the whole path. Just keep walking.

3 Next Steps

3.1 Grad School

I went to get my master’s and PhD in low-dimensional topology from Rice University under the brilliant and patient direction of Dr. John Hempel. I lived many of the canonical grad school horror stories, with feelings of failure exacerbated, because I believed I was supposed to eliminate all other facets of my life until I was just math. I now realize this was a terrible plan: things will go wrong with your math research and math career. When I was multifaceted, I could rebound from a failure in one area of my life because I was more than just that one thing. But, when my entire identity was wrapped up in math, failure in math translated to my complete failure as a person.

Near the end of my time in graduate school, I was “gifted” an opportunity to expand my identity. Due to poorly managed finances and a poorly chosen ex, at the beginning of my fifth year of grad school, I had a quarter million dollars in debt to my name, a deconstructed house that was worth about a fifth of what I owed, and a dissertation problem that had just been neatly solved and published… by someone else. My advisor helped me refocus on a different problem, and on the side, I also became my own general contractor. I was pulling permits and hiring subcontractors when necessary, becoming quite skilled in tile work and drywall and competent at residential-level electrical and plumbing upgrades. I owe many thanks to helpful neighbors, my parents who came out to lend some elbow grease, and to all of the collective expertise that could be found on the internet. I was able to sell at a profit, clear my debts, have funding toward my next home purchase, and finish my dissertation. Ten years later, I now have five home renovations under my belt, each aiding in creating some financial stability that has allowed me to focus on personal growth.

3.2 The Tenure-Track Position

As I proceeded down the next step in my mathematical journey, I jumped at the chance to return to my undergrad institution (the University of Tennessee at Martin) as an Assistant Professor. This was a friendly place to land after graduate school and figure out “what next?” in a supportive environment. I taught my classes, pursued research, and kept reaching up and out to the opportunities that interested me:

Student Clubs

I initiated a student club for researching green technologies, which petitioned the student body to get a vote to raise their own tuition and use the funds toward energy efficiency improvements on campus. I also served as a faculty advisor for the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and worked to revitalize a local chapter of the National Society for Black Engineers.

NSF EPSCoRE

I applied for and received an NSF grant to build a cross-disciplinary team to conduct research on reversible hydrogen fuel cells. I worked with a brilliant and eccentric retired British physicist, who had started his own winery in west Tennessee, as well as UTM faculty and students.

Qingdao Summer Teaching

I accepted an email offer to teach college-level math courses for a summer in China. I had very little information before I got there and realized only later that this international exchange was probably not following the intent of the law with regard to work visas, as it was actually a for-profit company that was running courses under the umbrella of an academic institution. With the other visiting faculty, we quickly had to organize and require administrative structures around courses, attendance, final exams, and grades.

Fulbright Scholar

I was awarded a Fulbright and jetted off to India to teach proof-writing and logic to master’s-level students, while also collecting data on cultural perceptions of Indian women in mathematics. Though feeling completely out of my element, I presented my preliminary findings at a sociology conference in Delhi that focused on gender harassment and disparities in academia.

STEM Study Abroad Program

With a chemistry colleague, I co-led a 10-day study abroad program for UTM students to examine the STEM industrial applications in Germany.

Despite a welcoming department, I still did not yet feel like I belonged in math. I did enjoy working with students and clearly capitalized on the flexibility that academia offered, pursuing a variety of other life experiences as I tried to find the right balance that would make this tenure-track job everything I thought I was supposed to want in an academic career.

3.3 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship

While in India, I was accepted as a Science & Technology Policy Fellow for a 2-year appointment in Washington, DC. So after 4 years at UTM, I left my tenure-track job, sold my renovated dream house on 9 acres, and headed to DC with a moving truck and 1.75 dogs. (I have two dogs and one has 3 legs. It would also be mathematically correct to guess that I had one, seven-legged dog. No one has yet done so.)

On the drive, I got a call that my intended position had been cut due to the government sequester.

Let’s revisit the part that says, I just quit my tenure-track job, sold my dream home, and am sitting alone in a truck with 1.75 stinky dogs so that I could pursue an adventure that had now evaporated. The next several hours were spent in tears and self-pity. Despite my inner-dialogue that could only sarcastically congratulate myself on ruining the rest of my life, I kept driving north to DC. I had no other options, so I still showed up, made calls, and positively pitched myself as capable of any opportunities they had left. I worked with AAAS to review what appointments were still available that would take a mathematician. (It turns out, many of them!)

I left academia so that I could pursue a position that would have placed me in governmental labs, helping me transition to more applied lab sciences and engineering. Well, that was my intention, anyway. Instead, I landed at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. I became their Evaluation Coordinator, working under the Director of the Institute (a former Ambassador) and her Deputy, both brilliant and strategic individuals who taught me how to play the long-game for creating institutional change. This role provided me a variety of experiences, such as:

The Day Job

As the Evaluation Coordinator, I was responsible for understanding the large swath of training and determining the effectiveness of training toward execution of national priorities. I was responsible for building a cooperative community of evaluators and leading them to develop Department of State-adopted policies and standards around training evaluation.

Assess, then Develop and Implement Policy

I traveled to five embassies in the Middle East to work on issues relating to how the US teaches Arabic dialects and help develop policies for training such dialects. I also traveled to the United Nations and the US’s European training headquarters to assess how the US was training in multilateral negotiations. In both instances, I learned how to assess costs to time, personnel, and morale when implementing change and developing implementation strategies that met the needs of those affected.

Some Math!

I did a tour at the State Department’s United Nations office to look at UN voting trends using qualitative clustering techniques. More than half of my time at this post was devoted to assessing how the appropriate personnel perceived, reviewed, and applied the information I presented them. In many ways, this pulled on my previous life in the classroom: I had to convey what the data meant and why they should care.

Side Projects on Behalf of the Ambassador

I was tasked with bringing some great (but nascent) ideas to fruition, like the establishment of an educational arm to review the implementation of diplomatic initiatives, and leading a cross-discipline committee on developing guidelines for evaluation that would reach across all Department of State training programs.

I learned a lot about how to get things done in a large bureaucracy, how to create coalitions, lead projects, and then get out of the way when others have better ideas. I worked with brilliant people from across the social sciences and yet just like in the math world, I was painfully aware that I was not from their world. This was not my “normal” and this was not where I wanted my career to stay for the long haul.

3.4 From Visiting Embassies in Suits and Heels to Working from Home in Yoga Pants

In the last 4 months of my Fellowship, I got a message from a recruiter who offered me half-time contract work with a Silicon Valley start-up. The offer was to work remotely on algorithm optimization for social media text mining and with a definite pay cut. But I would get my time back. Working in government, I realized I sorely missed autonomy over my own time, and now prioritized that above all else in this next career transition.

I tested the waters with this start-up, continuing with the Department of State while working nights and weekends because I didn’t believe this company actually needed me. But I quickly identified and solved organizational-level problems regarding accuracy of the algorithms, management of the remote technical team, and evaluation of customer needs. I was building off the skills I had just gotten in my last job! I moved on to manage a team that developed sentiment-recognition classifiers, and I worked on corporate expansion strategy. I know I can learn, and I know I like to be challenged to solve new problems, but this was my first experience where I didn’t feel like I was playing catch-up…and it was amazing! I had a skill set that was needed in this world that overlapped math and leadership.

It was awesome. I mattered. I was needed. There was a space for someone like me. This is what I needed out of a job, and jobs like this existed!

3.5 Capitalizing on Our Own Ideas

My husband and I jumped all-in when we won an NSF small business grant to bring our robotics and Internet of Things software integration framework to market. I left the Silicon Valley start-up and he left his work as a space roboticist at the US Naval Research Lab to build our own start-up, Service Robotics & Technologies (SRT). At SRT, I do everything from recruit and manage staff to oversee optimizing Kahlman Filters that reduce signal processing noise. We made the early years of SRT work by renting our DC homes, moving into a home we owned by the Johnson Space Center (Houston), renovating the home, running it as a start-up space with four different computer programmers crashing with us for nearly a year, and then selling the home as we moved back to DC. (Those home renovation skills just keep getting used!) At SRT, I work with people I like to develop cool technology. It is awesome! So why did I still not feel like it was enough?

3.6 AWM

As I learned about the Association for Women in Mathematics’ search for a new Executive Director, I realized what I was still looking for in a career: a clear path for giving back. My work as Executive Director brings together research mathematics, teaching, project management, monitoring and evaluation, program design, organizational development, implementation of institutional change, network building, grant writing, and fundraising in such a way, that…well…my career almost looks connected. Or even planned!

In my current role, I use skills I learned from leading negotiations at State, from fundraising and grant writing for the robotics start-up, serving as a technical liaison between customers and programmers at the Silicon Valley start-up, and from understanding the math world so I can communicate with members, and tap into my earliest loves and fears of math so that I am driven to listen to other’s journey. Working as Executive Director is the culmination of my past experiences, and yet I know there is still room to grow.

4 Devising My Career Litmus Test

So how did my cobbled-together “career” happen? How did I decide to make these transitions? Because at each juncture, I was hit with the fact that I wanted to do MORE.

  • But I didn’t know what MORE was.

  • Or where you find MORE.

  • Or how you actually do MORE when you find it.

  • I just wanted to do MORE.

That’s not a lot to go on, but luckily, I have never felt the need to make decisions based on the clarity of outcomes. I balance the risk and decide if I am going to jump.

So I took chances.

When an opportunity came up, I learned from a fabulous mentor to ask two things of myself: does this use my skills and does the work look interesting? I did not ask, “Where do I see myself in 10 years?” or “What’s the right path to get there?”

Instead, I had a nagging inner voice that said, “You can do MORE” and a level of judgment that merely said, “Yup. This sure looks like MORE. You should go do that.”

Let’s be clear that “MORE” for me could have been anything: a different academic position, a new institution, motherhood, astronaut, or rodeo cowboy. (Wait, not that last one. I already did that one.) It just so happened that the doors that I knocked on, that opened, and that I chose to walk through took me through a path that led away from the Ivory Tower.

5 Conclusion

I am a mathematician.

I was in academia, government, industry, and now am in the nonprofit sector. I have followed a very unconventional career trajectory that may not work for everyone, but it has worked for me: at each stage, I added meaningful (often unplanned!) experiences that were crucial in the next stage of my career. Each position showed me what I wanted (or didn’t want!) in my next job. Most importantly, an understanding of how I add value and how I want to grow as a professional means I was aware of the potential for opportunities as they came along.

A career is only labeled unconventional if we don’t see other people doing it. As such, these careers seem improbable and even intimidating. By shedding light on the different ways that professional life can actually unfold, I hope to help normalize such careers.

My unconventional career path included a climb up the Ivory Tower, and a lot of uncertainty when I decided I wanted to do something outside academia. In my current role with the Association for Women in Mathematics, I have an amazing opportunity to empower women to pursue whatever their dream job might be, however, conventional or unconventional it may seem.