UCLA Student Petition

I was on the job market in the 2023-2024 academic year, and a few of my students started a petition to try to keep me on at UCLA. This petition gained a lot of traction on Reddit, and ended up with 673 UCLA student signatures. An article was written about it on The Daily Bruin.

It meant a lot to me to see the outpouring of student support, as well as all of the comments left by my former students. If you contributed in any way, thank you!

As a note, the petition was well-intentioned, but slightly misguided:

To explain, my contract with UCLA was for a 3-year position (the equivalent of a postdoc in mathematics). In academia, the idea is that postdocs should develop the skills/receive the training that they need to be hired into a permanent position elsewhere. Thus, it’s not that UCLA wasn’t re-hiring me - I never expected to stay at UCLA in the first place!

I have always felt very supported by the UCLA mathematics department, and I think they definitely value my teaching. Fortunately, I have had success with my academic job search, and I am excited to start teaching at Rice University in Fall 2024.