Math, Molecules, and Woman

Math, Molecules, and Woman

Rimma Pivovarov NU ’10 and Jim Stellar

I first met Rimma when she was a prospective student interested in mathematics and I was Dean of the College at Northeastern University.  Now she is about to graduate and has developed a second interest in biology.  She is seeking admission to graduate school in a Ph.D. program.  But she also had significant experience with cooperative education.  So my first question is as follows: 

What were the experiences on coop that led you to develop/deepen your interest in graduate school and how did it help you achieve your current focus?

As a math major at Northeastern University the coops I was originally offered were mainly in finance or education.  These two tracks weren’t enough for me because ever since my childhood I had an interest in medicine; I decided to see if I could find an internship linking healthcare and mathematics.  I ventured out into a new field during my coop search, computer science, and took a computer science coop in a genetic testing company.  Although I enjoyed the 6 months of IT work, I wanted to delve deeper into the biology behind my programming.  I discussed this idea with you and with your help started my second coop at the lab of a chemistry professor who was studying protein dynamics on campus.  With two diverse coop experiences behind me, I began to see where the intersection of mathematics and biology lay.  I attended lectures around Boston on different combinations of the disciplines and discovered bioinformatics.  Using some of the contacts I made at my prior coops I found work at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Biomedical Informatics – where I have been for almost a year. Thanks to my three coop experiences at Northeastern University I have found the research work that I am excited about. I have developed passion for bioinformatics and I am eager to make my own significant contribution – I plan to begin my own graduate research next year.

This story really shows how experiences, successively put together, can lead to the focusing of a general interest into something that is much more specific and mature and can better lead to a graduate admission, not to mention any papers or other accomplishments accumulated along the way.  Now I want to go more personal and ask about your feelings in coming to this decision to apply to graduate school.  As a woman from an ethnic background, how did the work provide you with something the study did not (if it did) that helped you make this career decision?

In my culture education is extremely valued and for as long as I can remember I’ve been pushed to be great by my parents. I was always expected to be a good student and succeed academically.  Although I believe much of my initial success (getting into Northeastern University, deciding on an interesting and challenging major, etc.) is due to my upbringing, I think my coop experiences have brought me much further than my classroom success could. I believe my work experience has been crucial to my decision to continue my academic career as it taught me to have confidence in my abilities.   My first coop job was the first place I worked on my own, made my own decisions (which I had to rationally defend to my boss), and where I learned that my opinion had true value.  In my classroom experience I was taught theories and basic knowledge but many pieces only made sense later, with application. With coop, the application came as early as sophomore year of college.  After experiencing how all my knowledge could be relevant to out-of-school projects I began to look at all my following classes in a different light: instead of pure memorization school became more about imagining real-life applications.  If I had not been given the coop opportunity I do not believe I would have had the confidence in my own knowledge to chose graduate school so quickly after finishing my bachelors…if at all.

As a woman in science did you feel that this confidence boost was any more valuable to you than if you had been, for example, a man from the majority culture?

Yes, I think the confidence boost was especially important to me as a woman.  Choosing a career in science sometimes means choosing to be the only woman in a 10-person weekly lab meeting.  I am not sure I realized that when first deciding on a scientific career path and it was intimidating to try and not let it bother me.  Fortunately, with the votes of confidence I earned during my coops, sitting as a lone-female doesn’t seem that scary anymore, it’s rather empowering.

We want to call your attention to the way confidence built from experience interacted with career planning, influencing content learning which in turn reinforced the experience itself.  Some of these effects may be more pronounced in populations that are not traditionally associated with careers, like women from minority cultures working in math and science.  But rather than make a diversity argument, we want to focus on the thinking itself using an often noted comment by Albert Einstein that he thought kinesthetically, e.g. getting the feeling of what the world might be like if he was riding along on a beam of light, only to sit down and work out the mathematics later, proving the impression was right.  Howard Gardner calls this kinesthetic thinking – one of his multiple intelligences.  When doing the “math” on ones career development and future direction, it is often helpful to have these kinesthetic-based computations from experience upon which to reflect while making the decision.   We also note that this kind of thinking is not only about careers.  In our original reference, Einstein used it to figure out relativity.  The proof from mathematics and physics experiments came later leading to perhaps the most famous equation in the world: e=mc².  The trick in higher education is to find how we can develop and test programs that maximize this kind of dual thinking for many different purposes.