Love is in the air year-round at Winthrop. The university is the home to many professor couples, who have the opportunity to work alongside each other as they teach.
Finding academic jobs close together isn’t easy, much less finding a job at the same institution. Drs. Padmini and Hemant Patwardhan are a testament to that. Dr. Padmini Patwardhan is a professor of mass communication, Dr. Hemant Patwardhan is a professor of marketing and management. During Hemant Patwardhan’s last years of grad school and first year at Winthrop, he and his family were separated by several thousand miles when Padmini Patwardhan went to go teach school in Texas. When he moved to Winthrop to work, that distance grew even more.
“I was working here when she applied for her job in the mass communications department,” Hemant Patwardhan said, “We were very lucky to be able to start to work together.”
For Drs. Jessie and Arran Hamm, the challenge of finding jobs together presented a different set of obstacles. Both are associate professors of math here at Winthrop and expressed the challenges of finding a school with two positions open in the same department.
“God brought us here,” Jessie Hamm said, “We applied to tons of schools and both got interviews here, did our on-campus interviews together — that was so exciting — and everything worked out.”
She also spoke about how the school itself was what they were looking for in a job, “This is a school that really fits us well.”
For both couples, working at Winthrop has been a blessing, but they have had very different experiences. The Patwardhans work across campus from each other and their schedules rarely allow them to see each other while they are at work.
“We hardly ever run into each other during the day,” Hemant Patwardhan said, “So we really only see each other in the evenings.”
The Hamms work only a few doors down from each other in the same department, so they are able to interact a lot more throughout the day. They also have schedules that compliment each other so if they have an emergency with their son, the other can take over their classes.
“We get to go for walks together and have lunch together,” Jessie Hamm said, “Our department chair is amazing, so he will try to make it work for us so that our classes don’t overlap […] so we can cover each others classes.”
“It’s just nice to have someone to talk to that really knows what you’re talking about,” Arran Hamm said, “I feel like if we worked in different places, we would know different students, we would have different colleagues, the department dynamics would be different. It would just be more challenging to discuss the everyday issues that arise, so it’s just nice that we have the same dictionary of terms.”
Another benefit of working together in academia in the same or similar fields is that both couples have been able to collaborate with their partner on research projects.
“She and I have similar fields of study so we have been able to do some research together, which was fun,” Hemant Patwardhan said.
Currently, the Hamms are working together on research related to one of the oldest objects in math.
“To other people [it might not be], but to us, it’s super exciting,” Jessie Hamm said.
One of the only issues when it comes to working together that both couples experienced, was students mixing them and their partner up due to shared names. Both thought that the mix-ups were funny.
“Quite often I get her emails and she gets my emails,” Hemant Patwardhan said, “Students just see the Patwardhan and don’t see the H at the end or the P so we end up sending out emails that are supposed to be for the other person.”
Another pair of married professors, the Abernathys, work alongside the Hamms in the math department, so the students already had a plan for how to identify the Hamms.
“When we came even just for our interviews […] all the math majors had already given us names even though we didn’t even have jobs yet,” Jessie Hamm said, “All the students call me Jamm and then his was ManHamm.”
Arran Hamm is “working to get away” from his original nickname though and instead go by “The Hammer.”
From the outside, working with a loved one might seem intimidating, but these couples prove that assumption wrong. For the Patwardhans, they were forced to experience time apart before being able to be at the same school, making being at Winthrop more special and the times they can work on projects, more impactful. For the Hamms, though they work down the hall from each other they don’t get fed up with the other and instead choose to be joyful in that.
After all, like Arran Hamm said, “Everyone knows, math is the universal language, but what fewer people know is that math is one of the love languages.”
Photo: Victoria Howard/ The Johnsonian
