Starting in the winter of my second year of grad school, I spent a year stationed at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM) in Bonn, Germany, due to my advisor being dually appointed there.
While I find some of your experiences resonate with me deeply, it is hard to abstract what you are writing from the sheer amount of privilege you had (and continue to have). I can not speak for everyone reading this, but presumably, it is targeted at a sufficiently broad range of people in and around math. As a result, some of the things you write either anger or sadden me. Maybe I am mistaken, and you are writing only for people who had a similar upbringing, then I apologize.
Here's an example of what I mean from this portion of your text. I feel that for me, going for a term (or even for a month) to Bonn during my Ph.D. would be such a dream come true; it is hard to fully sympathize with what you are writing. Even though I can understand the pain you felt from interactions with grad students there all too well.
I don't know if you plan to address this in the future, but what is your perspective on this? For example, what did you think about people in math around you who had a "third-world" passport or fewer educational resources (during and before their Ph.D.)? Did it influence your perspective on your place in math, or not at all?
In any case, your writing is fascinating, and I sincerely hope you will continue.
Hello! Thank you so much for writing, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts and feelings about this. And I'm sorry for the slow reply; after queueing up all the installments of the memoir (back in early March), I disengaged from Substack to focus on other priorities.
First and foremost, you are absolutely right that I have enjoyed an incredible amount of privilege throughout my life. I don't want to discount that fact, whatsoever.
I also want to acknowledge an only partly conscious desire to continue to manage my image, even though I'm no longer striving towards the holy grail of tenure (cf. [Ch. 0]); it turns out that I care a lot about what people think of me, even when there's not a material justification for it (cf. [Ch. 0, Fn. 9]).
I have long noticed a fascinating constellation of desires around wealth, both in myself and others: a desire to benefit from whatever wealth one has; a desire to be seen as self-made (i.e. not benefiting from unearned privilege); and a desire to be (and perhaps even more strongly, a desire to _appear_ to be) spiritually untainted by one's wealth. To address to your final question, I would say that I had this same constellation of desires around my privilege in academia: a desire to benefit from it; a desire to be seen as self-made; and a desire to appear spiritually untainted by it.
Regarding my orientation towards those with "a \"third-world\" passport or fewer educational resources", I think I generally felt loving and supportive of the people that I liked on a personal level, so long as they didn't threaten my own delicate self-image. I certainly felt compassion seeing folks who were in relation to me the way I was in relation to "the other kids ... light-years ahead of me" [Ch. 3, Pt. 2/2]. However, I think it was also triggering for me at times, because I often saw my own struggles and failure to match my self-expectation very clearly reflected in them.
I do have some broader thoughts and feelings about power dynamics within the world of academia; I doubt I'll write about them directly, but these issues certainly remain important to me. I gestured towards them briefly in the latter two bullet-points of the "underrepresentation" section at https://etale.site/service.html, but of course what mattered much more was actually trying to live out these principles and lead by example.
Stepping back, I think one major take-away from the memoir is that even significant privilege doesn't insulate someone from the genuine difficulties of academia -- though I certainly don't claim that my specific experiences were universal.
Thanks again for writing, and for sharing vulnerably. I appreciate you, and I wish you well.
While I find some of your experiences resonate with me deeply, it is hard to abstract what you are writing from the sheer amount of privilege you had (and continue to have). I can not speak for everyone reading this, but presumably, it is targeted at a sufficiently broad range of people in and around math. As a result, some of the things you write either anger or sadden me. Maybe I am mistaken, and you are writing only for people who had a similar upbringing, then I apologize.
Here's an example of what I mean from this portion of your text. I feel that for me, going for a term (or even for a month) to Bonn during my Ph.D. would be such a dream come true; it is hard to fully sympathize with what you are writing. Even though I can understand the pain you felt from interactions with grad students there all too well.
I don't know if you plan to address this in the future, but what is your perspective on this? For example, what did you think about people in math around you who had a "third-world" passport or fewer educational resources (during and before their Ph.D.)? Did it influence your perspective on your place in math, or not at all?
In any case, your writing is fascinating, and I sincerely hope you will continue.
Hello! Thank you so much for writing, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts and feelings about this. And I'm sorry for the slow reply; after queueing up all the installments of the memoir (back in early March), I disengaged from Substack to focus on other priorities.
First and foremost, you are absolutely right that I have enjoyed an incredible amount of privilege throughout my life. I don't want to discount that fact, whatsoever.
I also want to acknowledge an only partly conscious desire to continue to manage my image, even though I'm no longer striving towards the holy grail of tenure (cf. [Ch. 0]); it turns out that I care a lot about what people think of me, even when there's not a material justification for it (cf. [Ch. 0, Fn. 9]).
I have long noticed a fascinating constellation of desires around wealth, both in myself and others: a desire to benefit from whatever wealth one has; a desire to be seen as self-made (i.e. not benefiting from unearned privilege); and a desire to be (and perhaps even more strongly, a desire to _appear_ to be) spiritually untainted by one's wealth. To address to your final question, I would say that I had this same constellation of desires around my privilege in academia: a desire to benefit from it; a desire to be seen as self-made; and a desire to appear spiritually untainted by it.
Regarding my orientation towards those with "a \"third-world\" passport or fewer educational resources", I think I generally felt loving and supportive of the people that I liked on a personal level, so long as they didn't threaten my own delicate self-image. I certainly felt compassion seeing folks who were in relation to me the way I was in relation to "the other kids ... light-years ahead of me" [Ch. 3, Pt. 2/2]. However, I think it was also triggering for me at times, because I often saw my own struggles and failure to match my self-expectation very clearly reflected in them.
I do have some broader thoughts and feelings about power dynamics within the world of academia; I doubt I'll write about them directly, but these issues certainly remain important to me. I gestured towards them briefly in the latter two bullet-points of the "underrepresentation" section at https://etale.site/service.html, but of course what mattered much more was actually trying to live out these principles and lead by example.
Stepping back, I think one major take-away from the memoir is that even significant privilege doesn't insulate someone from the genuine difficulties of academia -- though I certainly don't claim that my specific experiences were universal.
Thanks again for writing, and for sharing vulnerably. I appreciate you, and I wish you well.