Kelly Findley

Hometown: Houston, TX, USA

Fall 2013-Spring 2019

Currently Resides In: Champaign, IL, USA

PhD in Mathematics Education

Legacy Fellowship & McDonald Scholar

https://stat.illinois.edu/directory/profile/kfindley

Current Job/Occupation

I am currently a Teaching Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I teach undergraduate statistics courses, train and supervise graduate teaching assistants, and conduct research in statistics education.

Educational/Professional Background

B.A. in Mathematics - Bryan College

M.S. in Statistics - Florida State University

PhD in Mathematics Education - Florida State University

Experience as A Member of The Fellows Society

As a new graduate student, I enjoyed the opportunity to meet people from departments all across campus. Coming from a smaller liberal arts college, I was used to knowing people from all different disciplines, but large universities like FSU can be daunting in that individual departments can often feel like self-contained islands. I enjoyed attending a couple of the Fellows Forums and hearing interesting interdisciplinary discussions.

Currently, I teach a statistics course specifically for Biology majors, and thinking about merging my own discipline within the context of Biology has been a wonderful challenge. Interdsiciplinary interactions help bring awareness to disciplinary gaps in language and perspective that might not otherwise be seen. I think also being an a very interdisciplinary department (my PhD is in curriculum & instruction) and interacting with not only math education majors, but also science education, social studies education, and special education majors was an important learning experience for me to hear them discuss teaching and learning in their own disciplines.

Future Plans/Aspirations

I really enjoy my position now and hope to continue in it for at least 10 years if all goes well. I would eventually love to be a tenure-track faculty in a public university and help supervise undergraduate and graduate student research in educational topics, especially statistics education.

Advice to Share with Current Fellows

Find times to get to know one another and interact in fun, casual settings too. It's easy to put up a shield and feel like you need to appear smart, put-together, and intellectual in crowds of that nature, but realizing you are all real people, that you all have significant knowledge gaps, and that you all equally need down-time and social time is important for forming bonds and truly developing lasting relationships. If I'm being honest, I never connected with anyone at the Fellows Society gatherings. Some of it was because it was my first two years that I had a Legacy, and then when I switched departments, I had to switch to another non-fellowship package. I was fairly timid for my first two years and had imposter syndrome around the other fellows. Maybe it would be helpful to have "Fellow Small Groups" or something like that where groups of fellows from different years are put together for a year and meet up every month or two for more casual time to foster more cross-disciplinary unity and help newer fellows feel more comfortable with the group.