Jillian Cervantes always excelled at math, but growing up, she envisioned herself as a photographer or filmmaker. “I wanted to do something creative with my life, so math didn’t seem like a viable option,” she said.
Her perspective changed in college, where she found joy in the creative thinking involved in solving math problems. She earned her master’s degree in math and is beginning work on her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she’s conducting research and helping fellow students win scholarships to pursue their own math careers.
A winding road to purpose
After graduating from high school in 2014, Cervantes enrolled in UWM’s film program for a semester. She ultimately decided she needed more time to choose a course of study. During her break, Cervantes babysat for professors at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
“Meeting people in academia, and especially a professor who was Latinx like me, planted a seed that I could also work in academia one day,” she said.
In 2020, she enrolled at MATC with the goal of transferring back to UWM. Her general calculus course unexpectedly sparked a renewed interest in math.
“I realized that the higher you go in math, the more creative you can be,” Cervantes said. “I would meet with professors who checked my work, and my answer would be the same, but I had a totally different method for solving the problem.”
She transferred to UWM in 2021. During her junior year, her math professor, Pamela Harris, nominated Cervantes to receive funding to attend Field of Dreams, a national conference for underrepresented minorities in math. The experience was transformative.
For the first time, Cervantes was surrounded by mathematicians who shared her experience as a minority in the field. Inspired by the potential of community and diversity in the field, she decided to pursue math as a career. She applied for and earned a Support for Undergraduate Research Fellows scholarship and began conducting math research with Harris.
Along with her normal studies, Cervantes spent extra time studying graphs, coming up with and proving hypotheses. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UWM in 2024 and started her master’s the following semester.
Making a difference with math
Shortly after starting her master’s, Cervantes won a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship. Along with financing her degree, the fellowship pays a stipend, which allows her more time to do research. After a few years of studying graph theory — a field that can help improve efficiency for cell phone towers and electric vehicle charging stations — she’s now focused on topology, or the study of shape. The field could help biologists studying the shape of DNA strands.
Amidst her studies, Cervantes has found time to serve others, including mentoring and tutoring fellow math students. “My favorite (students) were the ones who were afraid of math,” she said. “Being able to encourage them and see them gain confidence was the greatest feeling in the world.”
After winning the NSF fellowship, Cervantes also created and led weekly campus workshops to help other UWM students complete the lengthy application. Along with helping students secure letters of recommendation from professors, she helped them craft compelling personal and research statements.
With Harris, Cervantes has helped half a dozen students write research proposals, outlining what they want to study in a PhD program. “It can be difficult to pinpoint what you want to research if you haven’t studied it yet, so we helped them build on projects they started in undergrad,” said Cervantes, who wants to package her mentorship materials so students at other universities can use them.
After graduating with her master’s degree in 2026, Cervantes is now pursuing a math PhD at UWM — and eventually hopes to work as a professor in the field. Her goal is to help students discover the creativity involved in math, just as she did.
“I’ve been given a chance to pursue the field that brings me joy, and I want my peers to have the same opportunity,” she said. “I want people to see how joyful and collaborative math can be.”
