Jana Asher is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She is also a Service-Learning Associate of the Office for Community-Engaged Learning at SRU, as well as outside of work, she is a member of the board of directors for the Pittsburgh Interfaith Evolutions Corporation (PIE), a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading interfaith understanding. Her research interests include questionnaire design, survey methods, record linkage, history of statistics, community-engaged education, and statistics education as well as her work with human rights and sexual violence. Within the ASA, she is currently a member of the Committee on International Relations and the Program Chair for the Section on Survey Research Methods.
Episode Description
From Florence Nightingale to David Cox we hear at Stats and Stories love tales of the careers of statisticians who made an impact on the world. Yes, friends in nursing, we claim Florence as part of statistics too. While those two pioneers are no longer with us, Jana Asher is here with us today in this episode of Stats and Short Stories.
+Full Transcript
John Bailer Florence Nightingale to David Cox, we hear it Stats and Stories love tales of the careers of statisticians who made an impact on the world. Yes, friends in nursing, we claim Florence as part of stat too. While those two pioneers are no longer with us, Jana Asher is here with us today in this episode of Stats and Short Stories to discuss her entry into the field of statistics in the impact that it's had on her. Asher is an assistant professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She's also a member of the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh interfaith evolutions Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading interfaith understanding. Her research interests include questionnaire design, survey methods, record linkage, history of statistics, and community engaged education, as well as work with human rights and sexual violence. She is currently a member of the ASI Committee on International Relations, and the program chair for the section on survey research methods. Jana, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jana Asher
Thank you for having me.
John Bailer
So Jana, tell us a little bit about, you know, I know where you are. Now, I've had the opportunity to see you present another context. I mean, we even had you as a guest on stats and stories very recently. But we really wanted to continue this conversation and talk a little bit about how did you get to where you are now?
Jana Asher
Well, you want the story from the very beginning. Yeah. I graduated in 1991, from Wellesley College with a degree in anthropology and Japanese Studies. And I did not take a single mathematics or statistics class. I got married pretty quickly after that, and had a child. And my husband was working for Digital Equipment Corporation and got a new job at a company in Pittsburgh. So we moved down to Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, my husband started, what we found out later was narcolepsy. He started experiencing the symptoms of narcolepsy. He was given a medication that actually made them worse because it suppresses REM sleep, and it was looking like he was going to have to go on disability and I was going to have to become the primary breadwinner for the family. So I was at home with a toddler and did a little bit of research and discovered that, hmm, actuarial science might be a good fit for me. I had done math back in high school and was pretty good at it back then. And you just take a couple of tests, you don't have to go back and get a whole nother degree and you can get a job. So I thought to myself, and I knew somebody who was an actuarial scientist at the time, basically got the idea from talking with her. So I looked around at the local schools and discovered that the best school in terms of their coursework for learning actuarial science was actually Carnegie Mellon. So I walked into the mathematics department and said, Hey, I want to take some classes. They were like, Oh, okay. And it turned out at Carnegie Mellon, you can actually attend for three semesters without being enrolled in a degree program, you can just show up, pay your money and go. So I enrolled in two classes, I think my first two classes were calculus one and some sort of introductory mathematics class related to analysis and theory. And it turned out, I was darn good at the stuff, I was getting hundreds on tests and that sort of thing. And that was great. And I was very successful. And so I continued taking classes. So these first two classes went very well, I got my A's, I signed up for two more classes. So I believe I started in the spring of 96 or so and signed up for two more classes, and they were going well. And we figured out what was wrong with my now ex husband. And he said, Okay, I'm better now you can go back to being a housewife. And I said, but I like doing this stuff. And I kind of think I might want to have a career now. And that really wasn't something he wanted to do, or be, you know, have had in his life. And so we ended up parting ways. So there I was, separated. In my first full time semester at Carnegie Mellon. I was now in classes like differential equations, and my very, very first probability and statistics class, which was a mathematical statistics class. And suddenly, I realized I had a little problem because he made pretty good money, but I was not in a position to be making pretty good money, especially as a full time student. So I only had $10,000 left. It was kind of like the story of Hanukkah, I only had so much money left, and it wasn't gonna last long enough for me to get through what I needed to get through. So I think the day that I discovered I was getting divorced, you know, I didn't finish my homework. And so I explained to my mathematical statistics professor, who was Stephanie Land, “sorry, I kind of separated from my husband last night”. She was very understanding and let me have a little bit of an extension on that homework. But she made the suggestion that I go talk to a professor named Bill Eddie in the department who had money to pay undergraduates because clearly I was going to need some money now. So I walked into the Pilates office and I remember distinctly He, you know, he was kind of trying to get a sense of who I was. And he looked me up on the Unix system. And I had a little byline in my little information on the Unix system that said, Don't wake the toddler. And he looked at me and said, Who's the toddler? You know, I'm like, No, that that would be my son. And he suddenly looked at me a little bit differently, like, Okay, you're hired. And I started working for him. But I still had this problem, like, like, even working, you know, it was great. It was a great job, I got to do research, I got to teach myself stuff, you know, it's terrific, but it still wasn't gonna be enough for me to finish school. And I explained this to him. And I said, I think I'm gonna be gone by the end of the semester. And he thought about it. And then he came back to me and said, Well, you know, there is a solution, you already have an undergraduate degree, why don't you come and do a graduate degree in statistics? And I kind of said, Oh, okay, I guess I could try to do that, you know, I'm only taking half of one statistics class so far. So I don't know how well this is gonna work, but, but he encouraged me to apply. And I was accepted. So basically, I was accepted just before the end of that year. And it was kind of like I was trying to balance between, well, I could get a fast food job, or I could be called a statistician. Vegetarian, so maybe the statistician job might be better than the fast food job. And I think I'd go with that. So. So I used my last $10,000 to pay for my last semester. Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad, ended up taking my second statistics class, and started graduate school after that. So that was the start for me. I was a statistician by accident, sort of.
Rosemary Pennington
That's amazing.
Jana Asher
Yeah. So serendipity matters here. Yeah, serendipity really matters here. I was extremely lucky to find the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon when I did, and I can't express how much gratitude I have that they took me in.
John Bailer
Well, that's what a wonderful start and what a marvelous career. That's, that's followed Jana, thank you so much for sharing with us this story of how you started in our career. And thank you for all the many contributions that you've made to our discipline. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.