Student-Led Academic Community Organizing

By Alvaro Carbonero, Brittany Gelb, Amaury V. Miniño, Vanessa Sun @vanessainstem, Lee Trent @vacuou5ly_tru3, @ourfa2m2

The OURFA2M2 organizers, all 20-22 at the time, exhausted, relieved, and thrilled, moments after the last of the conference participants logged off in December 2020.

In December 2020, five current and recent undergraduates held an online conference designed to connect underrepresented and marginalized undergraduates with resources to help them build their careers. We called it OURFA2M2: The Online Undergraduate Resource Fair for the Advancement in Academia of Marginalized Mathematicians. Over 100 students and 50 professionals participated in the conference, and the feedback and growing recognition we’ve received make us hopeful that next year we will have even more participation!

We believe that we’ve accomplished something powerful, and that’s not to be diminished. However, we also believe any other group of dedicated students could have achieved what we did. There are a lot of undergrads with great ideas for things our community desperately needs that they might never enact because their ideas sound too big to pull off. Maybe you have one of those ideas or maybe one will come to you soon. Your personal experiences in mathematics almost certainly reveal community needs not being addressed, and that perspective makes you uniquely qualified to imagine a solution. If it feels scary, we want to encourage you to be brave. Don’t run from it, run with it. If you try to find out what you are capable of, you will probably find out that it is more than what you'd expect, just like we did. We’d like to share our story with you, to show you that big projects are made up of small, manageable steps and that people like us, undergrads from various marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds, have as much power and skill in organizing as the accepted community authorities do.

After her REU in the summer of 2020, Vanessa started thinking about the things she wished she had known prior to the REU and even prior to applying. She was inspired by the ways she saw some other STEM communities organizing to share resources, and wanted to contribute in the same way to the mathematics community. She asked Lee and Brittany, friends she met online, to help her organize a panel of students to talk about REUs and internships to an audience of younger students planning their own careers. Lee suggested expanding this idea to a whole conference devoted to sharing different resources and ideas to help younger undergraduates in the mathematical sciences. Lee invited a friend she met at a conference, Amaury, and Brittany invited a friend from her REU, Alvaro.

This is how the team came together. We span all four primary US time zones and most of us have never met in person. We were three current undergraduate seniors, one first-year graduate student, and one temporarily dropped-out student planning to return to their undergraduate studies soon. Between the five of us, we bring to the table some of the experiences of women, queer people, Afro-Latinx and Latinx people, Asian-American people, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, disabled people, nontraditional students, and immigrants in mathematics. We did not meet in a leadership workshop or awards ceremony. In some sense we were lucky to come across folks with shared experiences and agreement on some of the needs of the mathematical community. In another sense, we were wise to recognize and call on our friends as we realized we wanted to build something. It’s worth noting that each of us had a connection to only one or two of the others prior to forming our group. Your team doesn’t need to materialize in front of you all at once. If you get a few people on board, and those people get a few more people, and you agree on a way to communicate with each other, that can be your team.

Once we had a team, we started building. We started with the fact that students who are traditionally left out of mathematics (students of color, women, LGBTQ+ students, students with disabilities, et cetera) are not getting information about career building opportunities, or not getting it as soon as others. That’s the first community problem we wanted to address. As we worked, though, we were addressing two other problems, even though we weren’t able to articulate these specific needs until after the conference.

The second problem was that we didn’t see a lot of community organizing for students by students. This seems to be largely limited to school clubs, which not everyone has access to and which vary in quality and purpose from institution to institution. Only current and recent undergrads know what it is like to be an undergrad at this moment in history, so there are needs that only we can recognize and address. We were trying to address some of those needs.

The third problem was that no amount of resources can make up for the fact that students who don’t see people like them doing math often struggle to believe there is a place for them in mathematics. Students who are traditionally left out need to see professional mathematicians who share their identities being successful to believe that they, too, belong in math. If you have never seen yourself in another mathematician, it can be incredibly difficult to imagine your path forward. And if you don’t know what your path forward is, you might just quit. So we were also trying to give students a chance to hear, from someone like them, what their journey through mathematics has been like. We wanted our attendees to come away from the conference not only with ideas for how to build their careers, but also the belief that it was possible, because people like them have done it before.

It’s okay to figure things out as you go. Two of the three major goals we developed as we were organizing, and we were only able to clearly articulate them after the conference took place. You might not know what you’re building until you’ve built it, and that’s okay! Your ideas will develop as they’re being built. Not knowing exactly what the fully fleshed out incarnation of your idea will be like shouldn’t be a reason you don’t begin the journey of building it. Begin your project with the idea, “I can’t wait to see what we build,” and be willing to be surprised in the end.

And what about the logistics? Aside from identifying goals and assembling a team, how do you organize a conference? A year ago, we didn’t know. It sounded mystical. Let’s demystify it. It’s a lot of emails, some forms and spreadsheets, approximately weekly group organizing calls, and a lot more emails. Almost every time we wanted to know “how do we get [speakers, a zoom account to use, participants to register, et cetera]?” The answer was to send some emails. Through social media and the rest of the internet, we did some research about people we might like to speak about mathematics or their experiences, and we emailed them and invited them. We brainstormed departments and organizations that might have a Zoom account we could use, and we emailed them. We designed a flyer and emailed it to departments and organizations who shared it with students who might be interested in attending. We had many meetings to talk about which speakers to invite, what topics to share, what presentations we should prepare, and which organizers should send which of the many, many emails we had to send. We organized registration in Google Forms and Sheets. We organized and reorganized our Google Drive as our ideas and our conference took shape. And by the time of the conference, we had outgrown our little group chat in Messenger and moved to a Discord server where we could keep each aspect of the conference in a different thread. There was a lot of work, but none of it required skills we didn’t already have or couldn’t learn pretty quickly. You, too, already have or could quickly learn to do any of these things.

Here’s another big question we had. How do we make our conference official? How do we, a group of five current and recent undergrads who primarily know each other through the internet, become official? And here’s the big secret of organizing, maybe the most important thing we learned and the most important thing for you to remember from reading this: If you’re organizing something, it’s official. You don’t need a department or organization to tell you to organize. You don’t even need them to endorse you. You build what you need, and that’s official. We set up an email account in the conference’s name and conducted ourselves as if we were organizing a conference, and then we were officially conference organizers. We didn’t need the permission of anyone with a Ph.D. to do this. And people took us seriously because we took ourselves seriously. There is absolutely nothing mystical about organizing something official. If you’re organizing something, it’s official.

We plan to make OURFA2M2 annual. We’ll be bringing on new organizers each year so that it is always organized by current and recent undergrads who know what their peers need. If you’re interested in helping or participating in the future, please sign up for our email list by going to our website, is.gd/ourfa2m2! If you have ideas you’d like to share with us, please send them to us at ourfa2m2@gmail.com! But remember, if you have an idea, you don’t need permission to pursue it. Not from someone with a Ph.D. and not from us. If you know what the mathematical community needs, find people who agree with you and start building. We can’t wait to see what you create.

Alvaro Carbonero graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Spring 2021 and will begin graduate school at the University of Waterloo in Fall 2021. Brittany Gelb graduated from Muhlenberg College in Spring 2021 and will begin graduate school at Rutgers University in Fall 2021. Amaury Miniño is entering his second year as a graduate student at Colorado State University in Fall 2021. Vanessa Sun graduated from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, City University of New York in Spring 2021, is an intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Summer 2021, and will be an intern at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Fall 2021. Lee Trent is entering her final undergraduate year at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Fall 2021.