Alumni Chats: Michael, Jackie and Joey Feffer

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Alumni Chats: Michael, Jackie and Joey Feffer

Meet the Feffers!

For the Feffers, math runs in the family. After participating in MATHCOUNTS as middle schoolers in Pennsylvania, Michael, Jackie and Joey Feffer have continued to use math in their lives and careers. We talked about problem-solving, having fun with math and bonding over math. 

Michael is pursuing a PhD in societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University. He also studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. Jackie works as an operational supervisor at McMaster-Carr. She studied psychology and economics at Harvard. Joey is pursuing a PhD in economics at Stanford. He also studied mathematics at Harvard. 

Photo of Feffer family

December 2024

At MATHCOUNTS, we talk a lot about the idea of doing math with other people and math bringing people together. How do you feel your relationships have influenced your interest in STEM and vice versa?  

Michael: We’re a pretty STEM-oriented family. Participating in various STEM courses, MATHCOUNTS and things of that nature brought us together as siblings. And for me personally, doing STEM and MATHCOUNTS helped me make a lot of friends and connections that I still have many years later. It reinforced my love for math and brought me closer to people. 

Joey: I don’t think I would be able to do the job that I do if it wasn’t really, really fun. Math, the way it’s sometimes taught in school, can seem so serious and cut off from a lot of the things we normally think of as fun, but MATHCOUNTS helped us access the ways that you could have fun doing STEM things. We used to bring a popcorn maker to practice…there’s so many memories that we built in this very STEM-oriented environment that just made it more fun to keep going back to.

Jackie: Growing up in our family, we all participated in MATHCOUNTS and Quiz Bowl and Science Olympiad, and they were nice family bonding activities. We were also homeschooled, so we had a lot of time as a family. At breakfast, our mom would take out these quick math cards and we’d do as many as we could. At times it could be a little stressful, but I definitely look back on it with fondness.

Michael, you’re in a PhD program studying societal computing. Can you tell us about societal computing? What sets it apart in the CS field and why is it important? 

Michael: At Carnegie Mellon, societal computing is one of the PhD programs offered by the Software and Societal Systems Department, which is in the school of computer science. There’s a lot of interdisciplinary work that happens in computer science at CMU. 

Societal computing includes a number of different research areas and topics, but they all involve interactions and intersections between people and computer systems. These might be small-scale interactions, like someone choosing their privacy settings on their smartphone, or large-scale systems, like how communities interact with AI. Other branches of computer science might be more concerned with the theoretical and technical aspects—which are still very important—but it’s also important to think about the implications of these larger systems, especially as they become more complex and more people start interacting with them.

Speaking of AI, you’re working on a lot of AI-related research. How do you approach research in a field that is so new and changes so quickly?  

It’s kind of hard, but I do my best to stay informed about various AI-related news and updates via a mixture of different sources. That includes traditional publication venues like conferences and journals, but also a lot of social media and news publications. There’s a lot of content to sort through to try and make sense of what’s going on and where things are moving, but that’s also part of what makes it interesting. And I’m not alone in this endeavor. I have two great co-advisors that also keep their fingers on the pulse, and we take all this information and try to do the best we can in doing some really cool, cutting-edge research. 

I’d also like to hear about your interest in music—you list music information retrieval as a research interest and you also minored in music during your undergrad. What draws you to that field?  

Part of that comes from my own personal interest in music. I was classically trained in piano and violin through college, so that’s been a formative part of my life. Since undergrad, I’ve also looked at music as something that, even though it is a very artistic endeavor, still has a lot of structure, from the way it’s performed to even the physical frequencies and note styles. It’s been really interesting to study that from a technical perspective as well, thinking about sound engineering and applying machine learning and AI to understand and even generate music. 

Doing STEM and MATHCOUNTS helped me make a lot of friends and connections that I still have many years later. It reinforced my love for math and brought me closer to people.
Michael Feffer
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Photo of Michael Feffer with his MATHCOUNTS team

My next question is for everybody: What made math fun for you in middle school and what makes math fun for you now as an adult?

Jackie: I think for me, math being fun both in childhood and now has to do with having the aha moment. In MATHCOUNTS, you’re balancing speed and getting the answer right. Figuring out you have the same answer as someone else on your team or helping each other get to the right answer—that understanding is fun. Now, when I’m using data analysis to solve problems, I still get to have that sort of revelation when I see how the pieces fit together.

Joey: I do theoretical math for my PhD. For me, there’s an element of playfulness and creativity both in my work now and in MATHCOUNTS when I was a kid. Trying things out and looking at them in different ways, it’s like playing with a puzzle or a game. It can be frustrating when it doesn’t work, but challenging yourself in those ways is so much fun. 

Michael: The collaboration and competition in MATHCOUNTS were fun. Collaboration is really important in research. I always talk to my co-advisors and others in the field to bounce ideas off them. The competitive aspect is different, because I’m mostly in my PhD program doing work for myself and for the scientific community. I’m not trying to race against the clock on some arithmetic problem like I would in a Countdown Round. But I would say that most of my enjoyment now comes from solving a really interesting problem, tinkering with something until I come up with a good solution.

Jackie, you work in Strategy and Operations at McMaster-Carr. Can you tell us about what you do? How do you utilize your skills in STEM and communication in your position? 

Jackie: I’m an operations supervisor, so one of the main aspects of my job is managing the team and operations day to day. I supervise a team of stock keepers and manage their performance. I also try to streamline processes, doing project work that is more data driven. It’s a really cool mix of hard skills and soft skills. I strive to be a mix of those things. I studied psychology and economics in college, so I wanted to be able to understand people and communicate with people effectively, but I also want to have the tools to solve problems and then communicate them.

How has your education influenced your career, as well as how you approach challenges and solve problems?  

I originally was studying economics with a psychology minor, but I decided to switch them because I wanted to focus more on understanding the person. Economics was very theoretical, and I wanted to ground myself in people and their feelings. For example, data might tell me that a stock     keeper isn’t performing well. But why? What’s the underlying issue? I think the best managers at my job can take a step back from the data and understand the context. 

You also lived and taught abroad before you started your undergrad. How did that experience impact you and your worldview?  

I studied in Spain my junior year of high school, and while I was there, I taught English to six-year-olds. The experience impacted me for sure. I was very lucky to be able to go abroad at such a young, formative age. I think if anyone gets the opportunity to do that, they should take it. I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but looking back, it made me realize how big the world was. Growing up we were pretty STEM-oriented. My decision to branch out and study psychology probably came from traveling and having those new experiences. 

If you’re stuck or have a deadline to meet, take a step back, look at problems a different way and ask for help...It’s good to know how to perform under pressure.
Jackie Feffer
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Photo of Jackie Feffer

When you all think back to the skills you used in MATHCOUNTS, how do you use those skills in your lives now?  

Michael: In my technical work, I typically use a lot of probability and combinatorics. If you’re doing things like machine learning and AI, you’re thinking about things like the chances that this image is a cat or dog based on what the model is telling you. Even some of the geometry rules came up in one of my publications, to form the foundations for some of the proofs I was writing. Beyond math, I’ve also brought collaboration skills from MATHCOUNTS into my day to day while I’m working on teams or collaborating with people in my field.

Joey: The math tools and ways of thinking I developed doing competitions in school have been invaluable to the way I solve problems now. I also think I learned about resourcefulness and figuring out how to get the resources I need to accomplish what I want. I remember being in middle school and wanting to learn more, and I found that by joining online communities, making friends at competitions, etc. Lastly, I had some big ups and downs in my MATHCOUNTS years that helped me grow emotionally. Not every competition goes perfectly, and I learned how to navigate disappointing situations by remembering what’s important to me.

Jackie: I remember learning how to handle a time crunch—taking deep breaths, coming back to things you don’t know. I think those skills really helped with test taking, but also with general problem solving. If you’re stuck or have a deadline to meet, take a step back, look at problems a different way and ask for help. There are stressful, high-pressure situations in my job when I have to stay calm and keep it moving. It’s good to know how to perform under pressure.

Joey, you’re pursuing a PhD in economics. What are you working on and what would you like to work on in the future?   

Joey: I work in a field called market design, which is basically about figuring out how to allocate things to certain people. It’s a field that’s really interdisciplinary within economics. For example, I have friends who study how to make sure water rights are allocated to the people who need them most, because water is becoming a scarce resource. I have friends who think about where to place wind farms and to help manage our energy transition. There are all sorts of really cool, practical problems that need hard, deep thinking. I work on the theoretical end of things, so I think about economic models and try relaxing our assumptions on how people think and what information they have access to.

What prompted you to study economics? What interests you most about that field, and what are you most excited about?  

My work feels a lot like the math I loved doing in school, so my day to day is something that I enjoy, and I feel really lucky to have that. I was also really interested in social justice in college and learned a ton about the world and who I was through it. I felt like I knew I wanted to do something math-related for a career and I felt like economics was a way to use my math brain to think about some of the things that I really care about in the world. I also really like my colleagues. A lot of my peers are very similarly concerned about the world and are so intelligent and it’s really inspiring to work alongside them.

In MATHCOUNTS, one of our most important impacts is the benefit of being part of the Mathlete community. You’ve been involved in several community organizing efforts. In your experience, what makes a strong community?   

The first thing has to be the people. As I’ve gotten older, I realize I did not appreciate how much work went into my  MATHCOUNTS experience. Our chapter competition was organized by professors and volunteers, and a ton of work went on behind the scenes to make it happen. The second piece of it is inclusion. As middle schoolers, it’s really fun to nerd out with people and be around people who are excited about math like you but there might be some people who are nervous or more withdrawn. Trying to be inviting to them is a really easy and actionable thing to make a stronger math community. 

For me, there’s an element of playfulness and creativity both in my work now and in MATHCOUNTS when I was a kid. Trying things out and looking at them in different ways, it’s like playing with a puzzle or a game.
Joey Feffer
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Photo of Joey Feffer

Can you all tell me about your favorite memories from your time in MATHCOUNTS?  

Jackie: I think my favorite memory would be when Joey, me and two other people on the team did practice rounds at our house. My mom brought us food while we all sat in this cozy little room and solved math problems, and it was nice to bond with my brother and teammates. It was definitely a formative part of my middle school experience.

Michael: Qualifying for the Pennsylvania State Competition was one of my favorite experiences in MATHCOUNTS. I didn’t consider myself that great at the Countdown Round at the time, but I think having a mixture of adrenaline and stress and being in that competition environment, I hit a winning streak and was able to qualify. And then attending the competition, I got to see people from all over the state that were also interested in math and there were all sorts of events before the competition itself that were really fun.

Joey: Qualifying and going to nationals my eighth-grade year was pretty big. That was a great year too because our team that Jackie and I were on placed at states. We were kind of underdogs that year—I think a lot of people didn’t really see our team as being super strong, but we took all those practices Jackie was talking about really seriously. It was nice because I had been focusing so much on the individual results for myself, and then our team did this whole thing that was so unexpected and that felt really great.

Do you have any advice for Mathletes?   

Jackie: I would say it’s okay if you’re not getting it as quickly or as easily as the other people in the room. Keep putting in the work and don’t feel bad if you don’t get it as quickly, because consistent practice really does make a difference. When you do put in the work, it can be more gratifying when you do finally get it. Keep on going and stick with it.

Michael: Practice, practice, practice. The downside is that there’s not really a shortcut to doing well, but the upside is that you really will get better after lots of practice. Remember, too, that there’s life and more math beyond MATHCOUNTS. Even if you don’t get exactly what you were hoping for in competition, there are lots of different avenues you can take afterwards. I never made the national competition, but I’m working on my third STEM degree. I’m doing a PhD program right now and doing graduate level research. Believe in yourself and your skills regardless of what happens. 

Joey: I think it’s so easy to go through MATHCOUNTS fixated on competition, but ten years later, you don’t really remember that. You remember the memories you made with your friends, or the moments when you surprised yourself and pushed yourself to do more than you thought you could. It can be hard to see those things in the moment, but I would encourage Mathletes to think more about those things and to have fun.

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