As we grow up, it becomes increasingly natural for the people around us to lose contact with the hobbies that were once so dominant in their lives. And eventually, the same may be true for us as well. While this is painful to accept, this new reality becomes the norm for some of us as we face new academic, adult, and career responsibilities.

I’ve been dancing since I was four and plan to continue dancing in college. However, I’ve always feared that dance would fade out of my life after college and become just a brilliant memory of my childhood. But what if this didn’t have to be the case? 

After learning about Sommer Gentry’s story from the Association for Women in Mathematics PlayingCards project, I am convinced that through constructing an interdisciplinary path between dance (or any of my non-academic interests) and my academic passions, there is a way for me to keep both equally important parts of my future life as well.

Sommer Gentry, previously a mathematics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and a coach at the Naval Academy’s Swing Dance Club, is currently a faculty member at the Department of Surgery and Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Gentry and her husband, whom she met through swing dancing, also started a swing dance community in Baltimore to introduce non-dancers to the craft.

In a 2004 interview for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gentry said teaching inspired her “to view dancing from an engineering point of view. ‘I realized it was an engineering question: How do you dance well with someone? It would be great to give people mathematical and engineering proofs of why they have to dance the way I say.’” According to ScienceDaily, while she was a graduate student at MIT, Gentry investigated the “complex haptic communication behind the often-improvised moves in swing dancing” and showed that two beings could move in coordination with pure haptic communication. Roderick Murray-Smith, a researcher who collaborated with her, said, “‘Sommer is entering an exciting area of research which is between engineering, psychology, and human motor-control studies. It could be of importance for sports training or rehabilitation engineering — the study of how to use technology to help humans overcome disability or injuries.’” It’s incredibly inspiring that Gentry was able to intertwine her academic work with her passion for dancing. Gentry says that by “melding her hobby with her work...means that even when I’m out dancing, I’m thinking about my research project.”

I love that she found that delving into her academic interests in STEM did not mean letting go of her other non-academic ones. Instead, she fully embraced both and found a way to incorporate both into her professional life. Just like me, Gentry is a mathematician and a dancer; thus, her story resonates strongly with me, and I aspire to be like her in the future.

Sources:

med.nyu.edu/faculty/sommer-e-gentry

usna.edu/Users/math/gentry/index.php

girlsangle.org/page/bulletin-archive/GABv10n03E.pdf

washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/22/naval-academy-professor-teaches-by-doing-in-both-d/

sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/040206085808.htm