Interviewing Dr. Banerjee, the first woman of color in the statistics department at Loyola University Chicago

Who is Dr. Banerjee:

This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity and privilege to interview Dr. Swarnali Banerjee. While she is new to the statistics department at Loyola and to Chicago in general, Dr. Banerjee has acclimated very quickly to the city and the school. She grew up in West Bengal, India, attending a school for all girls her entire life. Growing up, she always had a passion for mathematics, and especially statistics. Her family was always supportive of her studies, which made it much easier for her to come to the United States to pursue her passions. Once she immigrated to the United States, she began her PhD program at University of Connecticut and finished in a short 4 years (!!!). She began working at Old Dominion for two years as a lecturer and worked as the Diversity Director, collecting statistics and demographics of students attending the university. After a couple of years, her and her fiancé decided to move to Chicago for personal reasons. Luckily, she knew a colleague from UCONN who works in the statistics department and she had a fabulous track record at Old Dominion, which lead her to Loyola University Chicago!

Why I chose Dr. Banerjee:

The reason I chose Dr. Banerjee was because I shared similar identities with her and she is in a leadership position that I hope and aspire to be in a few years. As someone who identifies as Indian and as someone who identifies as a woman, and as someone who is striving to studying statistics and is in the process of applying to PhD programs, it is really inspiring to see someone who has “made it”. That is, to see someone who is in the exact position I want to be, regardless of other obstacles present, really helps me believe and motivate me to know that I can be there. Within the mathematics at Loyola, there are over sixty faculty members of which 6 are women and 2 are people of color. She is the first woman of color and Indian woman to be hired in the math and stats field and I am so thankful that she is here!

Three lessons that I learned from Dr. Banerjee:

Through our conversation and reflection after our dialogue, I learned various lessons from Dr. Banerjee regarding leadership.

She explained the importance of hard work, persistence and passion in her field. While she did not explicitly say this, I personally think it takes an extreme amount of bravery to immigrate to another country with different cultural norms and a different native tongue. I want to tell her narrative just as she did, and she did explain that she overcame some hardships such as isolation and trying to finish her studies in a short amount of time. However, her hard work allowed her to succeed at UCONN and receive her PhD. As she states, without her passion for her field she would not have been able to make it through school. I think this lesson can be applied to leadership in the sense that if the motivation is lacking for whatever social change an individual is trying to implement, success might not be possible. Passion for whatever your goals is essential to succeeding as a leader.

Additionally, she explained the importance of not paying heed to others and not allowing extraneous obstacles come in the way of her success as a leader. She talked about how her family supported her throughout her studies and how everyone in her family studied making her the black sheep for studying statistics. Nevertheless, she chose her field and wanted to study it. However, she was an unmarried woman at the time and people in her community are traditional and believed it was wrong of her to come to America as a single women. They believe that people come to America for other reasons, and not for education. She had the support of her family and she knew deep within that she had only her education at her core.

Lastly, her empathy towards students and others in group dynamics makes her a successful leader in my eyes. Empathy is fundamental to leadership because it allows an individual to connect with their group and if a group can succeed they can create a stronge impact than an individual. After reading the group dynamics article, I noticed she is fabulous at forming, storming, norming and performing within the classroom, allowing all particiapnts to feel included and welcome and able to voice their opinions. Within the classroom, she calls on her students and knows them all by their first names. She makes it a priority to create a wholesome and safe environment for all students. Additionally, she believes the classroom is only as strong as its wekaest player. This mindset is vital in the context of leadership as it attempts to bring the entire group up without creating a hierarchy and promoting inclusion.

WHAT IS COMMITTMENT?

Commitment is declaring a passion and doing all that is possible to stick with this passion.

COMMITMENT TO STATISTICS:

My entire life can be captured in three words: follow your bliss. Three simple words that when strung together, simultaneously represent not only an individual’s goal in life, but are incredibly hard to accomplish. I once read that bliss is defined as the summation of doing what you love, what you’re good at, and finally what the world needs. For me, bliss has been found in the field of statistics; I believe it allows me to satisfy the three postulates that the definition of bliss argues.

Ever since I can remember, numbers have been my language in the way colors speak to an artist or sound to a musician. Statistics has always been a field I find interesting due to its paradox of complexity and simplicity. Stemming from a few models created from some simple lines of code can predict the stock market, find correlations between various factors, or solve solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. This is the simplicity of it; however, the mixture and madness of it all often scares away many individuals. My passion lies in understanding the theory behind this madness.

As a math major, once I took the required statistics course, I was surprised by how quickly it became an obsession; this prompted me to add my statistics major which further defined my passion. In my predictive analytics course, I consistently scored the lowest error amongst class with my talent and love for coding. With a desire to apply my skills, I applied for my first research opportunity, the REU at the University of West Georgia in number theory and combinatorics. There I was able to learn the ins and outs of mathematical research and write a paper on Ramsey functions which will be published in The Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing in Summer 2017. My experience was so valuable that I applied to the DIMACS REU at Rutgers University for the summer of 2016 which focused on applied work. Through this program, I worked on optimization and empirical modeling problems. I was then hand-selected to travel to Charles University in Prague for an international conference focused on combinatorics, allowing me to connect with statisticians across the globe to see how they were utilizing their strengths towards the greater good.

COMMITTMENT TO LOYOLA:

While I grew in the field of statistics, I simultaneously spread my passion throughout campus through teaching and my involvements. I acquired the position of a Peer Advisor to teach a freshman seminar course. A love for teaching that I never knew within me burned a fire inside me. Working hands on with students, mentoring them, and watching them succeed immediately made me realize I wanted to be in a classroom for the rest of my life. As the Director of Community Outreach of the Mathematics (and now through my work the Math/Stats) Club, I succeeded at targeting the general student body through events like “The Statistics of Polling” to extend knowledge. For every sign asking for tutoring in math or statistics, I applied immediately.  Sparkling love struck eyes and eagerness are what people notice about me when I converse about statistics. Never did I struggle to combine what I love and what I excelled at because I was one of the lucky few that found the two intermixing. 

Seeing Dr. Banerjee do what I want to do was the catalyst I needed to pursue a graduate degree in statistics and become a professor. This final year I have applied to graduate programs, done research, and competed in data competitions. I will do all that is in my power to stick with this passion.