Undergraduate Student Travel to Conferences

Texas A&M Research Foundation, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

One goal of the Undergraduate Honors Programs in Mathematics at Texas A\&M University is to encourage students to continue on to graduate school in the mathematical sciences. Even before the start of the Honors Programs in Mathematics, in order to support our undergraduates in research, our previous VIGRE and our previous and current REU grants funded students to present their work at regional and national conferences. The PI of this proposal, Sue Geller, accompanied the students to the Joint Meetings, the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Woman in Mathematics, and MathFest to help them learn to benefit from attending conferences. The purpose of this grant is to expand the program of sending undergraduates to conferences so that some students may go without giving a talk or presenting a poster. In the past 5 years we have piloted the idea of sending a few women who do not present to the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. The results from this experiment are encouraging in that two presented the year after they went without presenting, two are now in the Ph.D. program in statistics at Texas A\&M University, one is a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut, two are actuaries, three are still mathematics majors, and only two, both underclassman, have switched to other fields, but ones that use mathematics. In general, the students come home from the conferences energized to excel at mathematics and to continue in it.