Rackham hosts many events to support all aspects of graduate student life. Please take advantage of this!
If you click on the Rackham Events Calendar or the Sessions @UM page, for example, you will find a host of interesting events. Examples just in the next week alone include these: a program tomorrow about addressing unconscious bias, Active Attacker Preparedness training, a lecture by Saudi journalist Safa Al Ahmad as she receives the 2019 Wallenberg Medal, a Mentoring panel organized by Rackham International with tips about time management, managing stress and fighting imposter syndrome, regular dinners with faculty for LGBTQ students (including one tomorrow night), and much much more!
Obviously, you will revolt if I spam you about every single Rackham event. For this reason, I am urging you to please to click on Rackham Events Calendar and/or click around on Sessions @UM, and consider adding something for your calendar for this year. In exchange, information about all these events will be safely stored on this blogsite at the provided Rackham links, instead of constantly in your inbox.
On a serious note: I want to convey to you that the value of these events goes far beyond the events themselves. These provide an opportunity to meet people who have information about many resources and opportunities at UM. This may come in handy some day when you need something.
I myself have learned, and relearned again, this lesson throughout my career. Here are a few examples from the olden days.
- An Ombudsman once made one phone call on my behalf while I listened in the room, thereby reversing a decision by my department to cut my grad student stipend because I’d gotten married (because, you know, my new husband could now support me instead. Alas.). I learned about the Ombudsman’s existence complaining about this at a (non-math) grad student party.
- Another time, I casually mentioned to a dean my plans to do research the following year on a fellowship. That dean immediately encouraged me to apply for a University program to “top up” the fellowship so I didn’t have to take a pay cut to accept it (though I happily would have). No one in my department had ever heard of such a fund.
- Finally, I got a maternity leave in 1998 before this was standard and after my department told me there are absolutely no funds for such nonsense. How? I’d attended a lunch for new faculty the year before and remembered meeting professors in other departments who’d gotten maternity leave. With that knowledge, I was able to investigate and eventually found a dean who immediately and happily supplied the funds to my department to release me from teaching.
My point is definitely not to harp on anyone for failing to direct me to these resources; indeed, for the most part, I found nearly all my colleagues to be supportive. My point is to remind all of us to go out and find them! There are far too many ever-evolving programs run by far too many different units around campus for any one person or department to have a grip on them all. The trick is to get to know a wide array of people who can help you find what you need. Moreover, deans have money whereas departments generally don’t, and because deanery is often more progressive than departments, they are your key to a wealth of valuable services, programs, policies, and funding. Math faculty and staff don’t always know about all these, though we certainly try, so please let us know what you learn! But in the meantime, don’t miss the chance to meet the people around UM with access to different knowledge and funding than we’ve got here in Math.
Plus, you need friends outside math. Trust Doug Shaw on this.—Sincerely, Your faithful Associate Chair for Graduate Studies.
