Interview with Applied Math Instructor Dr. Joel Nishimura

What Dr. Nishimura likes best about being a professor is that he gets to control what he thinks about whereas most jobs a worker has a boss that tells them what to do and what to think about. He finds it enjoyable to talk to students and that working as an applied math professor has a self serving ego component in the sense that not everyone esteems mathematics to be highly useful or even a subject to easily converse with anyone, thus the workplace in which he is in mathematics is viewed as highly important and interesting. In return he finds this very rewarding. 

What he finds the worst about being a professor is that he makes less money than most of the colleagues that left from being a professor and have gone to industry jobs. He also dislikes that even though he can see how his work has an impact on his students, there is an abstract view of his impact on society. He also dislikes how the job can at times become highly stressful because of research, and research that has to be done before tenure, etc. 

Dr. Nishimura spoke about how he had always liked math and was good at math. He mentioned how he was in a math club in high school, however did not plan to pursue mathematics in college. He was not aware at the time of the different career opportunities that mathematics had. He started as a Bio-engineering major, but took math courses as hobby but more for competition with his friends. He realized that he didn't like the courses he was taking for his major, and began liking his mathematics courses even more. What got him into applied mathematics was when he took a graduate level dynamical systems course in his undergrad as he liked the course material very much. 

Dr. Nishimura said that there was not anything that he could think of in his field that surprised him but rather the division between fields and how little as a society we esteem quantitative skills. He said that one would think especially in this modern era where we are surrounded by so many statistical, mathematical and computational needs that quantitative skills would become such an integral part of our education and required skill set, but instead it seems that math and stat are just specialized areas. He also mentioned how many times he will try to understand other peoples' fields and work so that he can try to converse with them but it never seems that anyone tries to understand his work as a mathematician to try to converse with him. He finds all of this surprising.