Featured Woman in STEM: Katie Marinoff (part 1 of 2)
Katie Marinoff is the Membership and Volunteer Coordinator at the Discovery Center, and before she joined the Discovery Center team, she was studying math. While her day-to-day duties don’t fully rely on her math background, she does find that the lessons and skills she learned while pursuing an education in a STEM subject often come in handy. Read Katie’s interview below to see how she got interested in math, what her favorite parts of it are, and how she incorporates her love of numbers into her job!
What is your area of study and how did you get interested in it?
I’m a mathematician—I earned my Bachelor of Science degree from Keene State College,majoring in math and minoring in physics, and my Master’s in pure mathematics from the University of New Hampshire—but growing up, I never thought of myself as a “math person.” While I did well in my math classes, I didn’t enjoy them. I thought in math you were either right or wrong and there wasn’t any room for creativity.
I much preferred my English classes, so when I started college, I thought I might want to be an English teacher. But I liked physics and chemistry, too, and I didn’t want to completely block out the option of studying those subjects. So when I was creating my schedule for my first semester of college, I made it as all-encompassing as possible, which meant taking Calculus I.
My calculus professor taught the class in such a way that, for the first time, math just clicked. He presented the material so much clearer than I had seen it before and in such an interesting way, that I was always excited to go to class. Halfway through the semester, I knew that I wanted to know more about math, and declared my major.
From there, I just got more and more interested in math, and I decided to go to grad school. While at UNH, I worked as a teaching assistant and realized how much I liked teaching. Although I liked working with students in a classroom setting, I much preferred a more informal learning environment, which led me to look for career opportunities in museums, and, in particular, my job at the Discovery Center.
What do you like most about your field of study?
Math is the language of the universe. When scientists try to explain natural phenomenons, they do so with numbers. So when you’re studying math, you’re not just adding and multiplying numbers; you’re exploring patterns and cycles of the world around us. Investigating the interesting ways numbers interact with each other and seeing geometric properties that you learn about in a classroom manifest in nature are a couple of my favorite parts of math.
Katie Presenting her poster on selective sums at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2017
Another thing I enjoy about math is how passionate people who study it are. In college, I was fortunate to attend and present at several undergraduate conferences, including Smith College’s Women in Mathematics in New England (WIMIN) Conference and the University of Nebraska’s Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. At these conferences, I was able to see prominent women mathematicians present on their work and talk with fellow female math students about our studies and our experiences of being women in a field that has a majority of men. Getting to see these presentations and have these conversations was really inspiring and encouraged me to pursue a graduate degree in math.
How do you incorporate your educational background into your current work?
It may not seem obvious how a background in math helps me in my role as the Membership and Volunteer Coordinator at the Discovery Center, but I use a lot of the skills I’ve gained through my educational background every day. Analyzing data and situations, processing information, and coming up with creative, logical solutions to problems are all abilities that I fine-tuned by studying mathematics that come in handy in my job.
I also have opportunities to share my knowledge with our visitors. I’ve posted several math-based At-Home STEM Activities on our blog and created hands-on activities at the museum about the math behind paper snowflakes and origami, pi, and the Pythagorean Theorem. In July, for our second virtual Super Stellar Friday event, I turned my Pythagorean Theorem activity into a presentation, talking about who Pythagoras was and how the theorem has been proved in various ways.
Have you learned any lessons from working in STEM that you'd like to share with our audience?
Studying STEM can be really difficult and frustrating at times, and sometimes that challenge can be overwhelming and lead to failure. But, especially in the sciences, failure happens! While messing up can be a little upsetting, the biggest lesson I’ve learned from studying math is to try not to focus too much on your mistakes, treat them as learning opportunities, and keep moving on.
