"Personally, I am most proud of taking a leap of faith, leaving a tenured faculty position, to relocate to the DC-area to be near and help care for my aging parents. It has been the best decision of my life."

"I was a creative writing major at that school. There was math happening but this was in no way an environment of STEM that I’ve experienced today."

"I never thought of myself as a mathematician. I went to a performing arts school from the fourth to the eighth grade. Most of my formative years were spent in classes where there was creative dance, piano and art."

"In high school, I got accepted into a magnet program. I switched to a different school because I had heard this program was like my art school but just for math and science, I thought it would be interesting to see how that would turn out and it didn’t go so great."

"My journey is weird because I feel like I operated in the complete absence of a mathematical community."

"I was always drawn to puzzles and captivated by mathematical thinking and trying to understand how things work. When I was little there were Magic School Bus books with information bubbles."

"I was dismissed after the first year because I didn’t get high enough grades in geometry and statistics, and this was a program where you couldn’t get C’s and I got C’s in those courses."

"My thesis is this thing that was initially going to be a grenade launched at my ex-prison, for better or for worse, and instead turned into some kind of positive seed bomb where flowers have sprouted beside the foundations I thought I wanted to crumble."

"I’ve always loved math, but I don’t think it always loved me back"

"ou don’t need to have a special brain or be a certain kind of person to take on math"

"My thesis is that thing I got sick of just when I should have been fine-tuning its organization. It’s where I find typos that have already gone to print. I am a writer; don’t ask me about my writing."

"I just thought it would be fascinating. It's just something that I had thought about doing. Now, my original plans, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse, but I think that was because my mother instilled that in me, because when I grew up, nursing and teaching were"

"I guess we would call the protected fields. I could very well get a job in nursing or teaching when you're done with school."

"I didn't want to teach, but the nursing field, I always said, "I want to be a nurse." But maybe about the tenth grade, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I decided pharmacy is something. Now, it may have something to do with going to the corner drugstore, where they had all of the candy and the ice cream. [Laughter] I'm serious. But the pharmacy, I would see the pharmacist in there, and it just looked like a good field."

"But we didn't tend to do that here. It was just a different style of living; people did things differently. And I think we were more involved in our own personal things than the rest of the neighborhood."

"The goal is not just to teach them how to get a job, but to create jobs and reinvest in our communities."

"I still see colleges and universities hiring for these positions, but when comparing the number of open positions to the number of Ph.D. graduates annually…there are not enough academic jobs. So what to do? I recommend considering jobs outside academia."

"All too often in the MATH community, because of its traditions, a common sentiment is one that unless you are tenure-track faculty, you’re not a good mathematician. It took time…but I got over that nonsense. I wanted to do something different with my mathematics. I went BIG."

"I will say that not just the people here, but I think I fell into it myself. We were not as friendly. And I don't mean to say real hostile. But when I grew up, if you walked six blocks to the streetcar, you spoke to everybody in every house, or who's on the porch."

"I'd like to just throw in here at this time that I tell people that it doesn't matter what your age is or what you decide to do when you're eighteen or sixteen, it doesn't matter if you change your mind later on and change fields, because we need to be flexible."

"When I finished my PhD, there didn’t seem to be a shortage of academic jobs. You might not get a position at Research I institution, but you could find a tenure-track position at a pretty decent institution and be happy."

"When one HBCU wins, we all win."

"Now don’t get me wrong, I knew mathematicians did more than teach. But personally, I had not done a lot of applied mathematical work. Nothing wrong with it, I just hadn’t. (My area of research was a branch of Combinatorics called Matroid Theory.) However, when I started looking I found all kinds of employment opportunities."

"Until a few years ago, I was a “wayward” mathematician. I thought all I could do was teach and I wanted out. While teaching is noble and one of the highest callings, I wanted to do something other than my tenure-track position."

"I grew up on a small farm in Camp Hill, Alabama, with my four siblings. My elementary school education took place in a one-room school house in my community. Although my love of mathematics was passed down from my mother, both of my parents instilled in me a love of learning and a concern for the education of others."

"Women make a B on an exam and they are crushed, they think it's terrible. Men make a B and they think it's great."

"I am very proud of all the students that I have taught, supervised in research or summer programs, or mentored over my 35-plus years as a faculty member at Spelman College, a place that supported me through enough different roles and opportunities that I enjoyed going to work every day."

"I don't know how much I helped but he gave me credit on the paper. That was a boost to my ego and really got me going in math."

"That was the one course that didn't come easily, let's put it that way."

"Male faculty tend to be less sensitive to the ways in which women treat their studies."

"My application to the Mandela Washington Fellowship was driven by my quest for an experiential learning program that would improve my capacity in providing educational services and opportunities to children with disabilities and adolescent girls."

"I didn't know they lay of the land," quips Bozeman. They wanted her to go back to school to finish her Ph.D. She just looked at them thinking, I have a husband and two small children, how am I going to go back to Vanderbilt four hours away?"

"There’s always been magic in complex math calculations,” she says. “I used to think about problems all day long. Sometimes I solved the problems in my sleep. But then I would wake up and couldn’t think of what I did. So I trained myself to write down the solution immediately"

"My mother only finished the 12th grade but she was always excited about math."

"Amongst us were persons with disabilities as well as persons with different personalities and sexual orientations. We all learned together and enjoyed equal opportunities in a fully inclusive environment that made learning interesting for all."

"My math teacher, Mr. Frank Holly, would not let me stop doing math."

"I could do a split, but another African American girl could do a flip,” she remembers. “There could only be one African American cheerleader, and I couldn’t do a flip, so that was that."

"During the six weeks academic residency, I and 24 other Young Africans from 21 different countries were hosted by one of the top universities in the United States; Drexel University, located at the heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."

"I had the opportunity to visit schools for the deaf, libraries for the blind, and art therapy centers. These visits afforded me a firsthand appreciation of how serious the inclusion of persons with disabilities mattered to the American people."

"My favorite academic experience occurred during our personality and leadership assessment session. As a Choleric with keen attention to details and work performance, I have thought to myself a few times that I was excessive, but learning about my strengths and confirming its significance to my work was empowering. I am now deliberate about my choice of support teammates."

"I received a very strong public school education. For as long as I can remember, even before I started school, I had a love for mathematics. I think there was something about both the logic of math and the fact that in math there was a “right answer” that appealed to me (clearly before I knew about stochastic mathematics)."

"For a long time, I wanted to be a math teacher, but in high school I started to think about working in jobs where I could “apply” mathematics (though I only had a vague idea of what that meant)."

"I grew up in 1960’s in Winston Salem, NC. in a low-income, single parent household. At the time, the schools in Winston-Salem were segregated but, due primarily to the dedication of my teachers and my own motivation"

"In 1980 I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ. Eventually I had a 25- year career at Bell Laboratories and, after the breakup of the Bell System, AT&T Laboratories."

"As the first African American female graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering in 1961, I did not have a role model,” she writes in part. “I understand that requests are not few, and her contacts must be very limited. If there is a way that a meeting can be arranged or a sighting, I am very interested. … Knowing of her has been an inspiration to me."

"Someone actually got what went on and how I felt"

"Girls always come up here, but they never finish, and you won’t finish either.” Then he glanced at her hands and added: “Besides, you’re never going to be able to draw with those fingernails.”"

"Some of it may have been racial prejudice,” she says, “but they didn’t even have to get to racial because being a girl in engineering, being female, was enough"

"Ultimately,” he adds, “if we are to maximize human potential, having a safe, welcoming environment is absolutely vital for knowledge generation and for learning. I’m certainly committed to making sure that the Swanson School and the University of Pittsburgh are the best places for individuals to come and do their best work"

"During my time at AT&T I learned the importance of mentoring. I have mentored hundreds of people over my career, first at AT&T and, more recently, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), where I continued my career after leaving AT&T. I am very proud of the impact I have had on the careers of so many people."