Hello and welcome from the other half of this new phase of PhD + Epsilon. I’m Sara Malec, beginning my first semester as an assistant professor at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.

Like Beth, I would first like to thank Adriana for sharing her wisdom with the community and building this column that we’re both so excited to inherit. As she enters the next stage of her career, I look forward to following her new posts and seeing what’s in store for me (fingers crossed) on the other side of tenure.

My path to academia was somewhat indirect. I started life as a physicist at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, but gradually shifted to mathematics. After graduation, I joined Teach for America and taught 8th grade math in Atlanta Public Schools. I learned a lot over those next two years, but the most important lessons were 1) I enjoyed teaching, but K-12 education in at-risk schools was not a sustainable career for me, and 2) I desperately missed learning new mathematics.

So I enrolled in a couple of post-baccalaureate classes at Georgia State University to try grad school on for size. It turned out to be a great fit, and I continued at GSU, studying commutative algebra under the direction of Florian Enescu. Following graduation, I was accepted as the teaching postdoc at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. I had a wonderful two years there learning the nuts and bolts of life at a teaching-focused liberal arts college, and now I’m excited to build on that at experience here at Hood.

This column will certainly evolve over the years, but I plan to write a lot about the many juggling acts inherent in the job: dividing energy amongst teaching, research, and service, and this “work-life balance” thing I’ve heard so much about. Other topics of interest to me are: inquiry-, project-, and group-based learning, guiding undergraduate research, cultivating mathematical interest and success in students from underprivileged groups, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and using technology for teaching and organization.

I invite you to help shape this column too, since I hope this will grow to be much more than simply my online diary. Please comment with a hello, a suggestion for a topic of interest to you, or a few words about what you wish you’d known when you first got started. You can also find me on Twitter at @saramalec.

Hello! This is Beth Malmskog, one half of the next iteration of PhD + Epsilon. First, hooray for Adriana Salerno for earning tenure at Bates, officially moving more than epsilon past her PhD. Hopefully there is a PhD + 2(Epsilon) blog in the works for her next adventures. Thanks to Adriana for starting this blog and speaking up about the great and grisly parts of starting out as a math professor. I’m really excited to be tag-team writing on this new chapter of the blog with Sara Malec (who will be writing later today to say hello). We will be posting in alternate weeks after these quick introductions, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be spectacular.

My epsilon is currently a bit over 4 years. That seems long, and when I graduated I think I would have been surprised to hear that at this point I would still feel that I am getting started. My epsilon looks larger when you change units from years to apartments: I have lived in 8 houses/apartments (about to be 9) since I got my PhD. A little background on me: I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming and majored in math at the University of Wyoming. After a few years out (spent teaching trigonometry, working in coffee shops, a hotdog stand, and a flower shop, delivering phone books, etc) I went back to school at Colorado State University. I studied number theory with Rachel Pries, and after graduation worked for 3 years in really great visiting positions–one year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and two years at Colorado College. Last summer I moved to Philadelphia for a tenure-track position at Villanova University, where I’m about to start my second year.

This blog is about what it’s like to be an early career mathematician. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on that, since I’m just figuring out my own math life, and there are so many different possible mathematical careers, even a wide range of academic math careers. I am here to share my experiences and thoughts on teaching, how my research is going and how I try to keep it alive and exciting, the endless process of applying for things (jobs, grants, reappointment, tenure… this does not appear to have an end), and my attempts to stay pretty healthy and happy at the same time. Hopefully it will also be fun (for more than just me), and open some discussion on all these topics in the comments. So thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for sharing your own experiences and ideas!

So, dear readers, the time has come for me to retire. Yes, epsilon is now a large positive number, and we all know that cannot go on unchecked. But don’t despair, I leave you in good hands. The blog will continue to be focused on the experiences of early career mathematicians, it’s just that I am no longer in that group. The new editors,  Sara Malec (from Hood College) and Beth Malmskog (Villanova University), will bring their own unique points of view and exciting spin on what it’s like to be at the beginning of your mathematical career. I am excitedly awaiting their posts and look forward to being on the other side of all this, as a reader! In this post, I just wanted to look back on my Epsilon years and share those memories with you.

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