|
PBA Home >
Institutional Research & Analysis >
Outcomes Assessment >
Unit Summaries >
Department of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics Graduate Assessment
Last updated 2/18/2003
Activity in 2001-02
Graduate Recruitment
The University Fellowship funds have enabled us to offer $1000 "recruiting"
fellowships, and thus have helped us recruit some of the strongest applicants to
our graduate program.
In recent years we have used some Graduate Committee funds to help pay the
travel costs to allow strong prospective students to visit the campus. They
typically stay with current graduate students, who talk to them about the
program and show them Boulder. This has proved to be an extremely effective
recruiting strategy, improving the overall quality of our graduate population.
We are currently making significant improvements to our web pages describing
our graduate program and the opportunities & training available to our graduate
students. We expect this to help attract stronger applicants, and to strengthen
our program’s reputation, helping to place our students better once they
complete the program. Also, beginning this year, we are involving our current
graduate students in our recruiting efforts: when we sponsor them to give talks
to undergraduates at other institutions, we ask them to spend some time talking
to the undergraduates about our graduate program. We expect this to be very
effective in attracting more strong students to our program.
We hope that the new policy on out-of-state tuition waivers will enhance our
ability to recruit strong foreign students. We have introduced an MS in Applied
Math that is attractive to a broad range of students. We will contact
mathematicians at colleges having substantial minority enrollments, in order to
encourage applications. The Age\EP program will help attract them to our
program.
Graduate Admissions
Our applicant pool is from a wide variety of institutions; including many
large public universities as well as many small liberal arts colleges. These
include: Boston University, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, Mesa, Haverford and
Harvey Mudd.
Our entrance requirements are 30 hrs of undergraduate mathematics including a
year of Advanced Calculus and a semester of Abstract Algebra or Differential
Equations as well as their GRE exams.
This year’s applicants included 18 women, an occasional Hispanic and a few
Asian students.
Most of our graduate students have undergraduate degrees from large state
universities. About a third of them come to us immediately after graduation and
the rest have had a few years of experience in secondary education or industry.
Every year a few transfer from other graduate programs.
Career Placement
About 50% of our Ph.D. students work in the local government labs for a least
a semester before graduation. Some much smaller fraction of our Masters Students
also works in the local government labs and small software companies. After
graduation about half of PhD’s get jobs in industry, and most of the rest go to
work for small liberal arts colleges. About 3% our Ph.D.’s are unemployed
immediately after graduation. About one quarter of the Masters students who do
not continue on for a Ph.D. go to the secondary schools, a few teach for us, and
the rest go into industry. The Mathematics Department has good contacts with
NCAR, where many of our students work both before and after graduation.
New Graduate Academic Initiatives
This term some of our graduate students are preparing talks to be presented
to Colorado high schools and middle schools with diverse populations of
students. The Diversity Committee will provide any help desired in shaping these
talks, help arrange these talks with the host schools, and pay the graduate
students’ expenses as well as a small honorarium. While several faculty are
interested in giving such talks, we are encouraging & supporting graduate
students to give such talks since (1) this is an excellent opportunity for
graduate students to develop their own outreach efforts with support from more
experienced faculty, and (2) being at earlier stages in their journey into
mathematics, our graduate students are bound to be more effective than our
faculty in enticing students to consider pursuing their education in
mathematics.
This term the Graduate Committee has begun to sponsor our graduate students
to give talks for undergraduates at other institutions. The graduate students
first give graduate level versions of their talks in the department’s Slow Pitch
Colloquium, a weekly forum for graduate students organized by graduate students,
and in which most of the speakers are graduate students. Sometimes the graduate
students will then present an undergraduate version of their Slow Pitch talk to
the undergraduate Math Club, enriching the activities of the Math Club,
enhancing interaction between the undergraduate math majors and the math
graduate students, and allowing the graduate students to practice their talks
for undergraduates in a relatively safe and supportive setting. Then the
Graduate Committee will help arrange for the graduate students to give their
talks at other colleges and universities, both inside and outside the state of
Colorado. In addition, the Graduate Committee will help pay the expenses the
graduate students incur to give these talks. Currently we have arranged for two
graduate students, Christine Jerritts and Christopher Seaton, to give
undergraduate talks at the University of Wisconsin, Madison during the 2003
calendar year. We are in the process of arranging for various graduate students
to give undergraduate talks at Colorado College, CU-Denver, and Fort Lewis
College.
This year the department used the Thron Fellowship fund and University
Fellowship funds to create five Summer Research fellowships for summer 2003. The
five recipients of these awards are our five students in the throes of producing
the results for their doctoral dissertations; we were able to award them ample
funding for their living costs, and we expect them to use the summer to
vigorously pursue their research and not seek outside employment. We expect
these fellowships will have a significant impact, allowing the recipients to
obtain stronger results and to complete their theses in a more timely fashion
than has been typical among our doctoral students. Using a small amount of the
Graduate Committee budget to supplement these awards to even dollar amounts, the
2003 Thron Summer Research Fellowship is being awarded to Christopher Seaton in
the amount of $8,800, and the 2003 University Summer Research Fellowships are
being awarded to Christopher Catone, William Kirwin, John Massman, and Erich
McAlister in the amount of $6,400 each. Mr. Seaton is a 4th year
graduate student working with Dr. Carla Farsi, and he has already obtained some
interesting results; the other four awardees are working quite successfully on
very promising theses. We expect all five awardees will graduate in spring 2004.
This year approximately $16,500 of University Fellowship funds was used for
recruiting & retaining our strongest graduate students. Eighteen students
received $1000 for this academic year. These small awards are particularly
effective in recruiting the stronger applicants to our graduate program, and we
hope to be able to continue offering these small incentive fellowships. We
expect an even stronger positive impact from the summer research fellowships
awarded to mid-thesis students. We would like to use the Thron Fellowship funds,
Stribic Fellowship funds, and University Fellowship funds to award Summer
Research Fellowships to our promising, mid-thesis students in summer 2004. We
expect to have at least 10 promising mid-thesis students in Summer 2004. One of
these students we will support with the Thron Fellowship, two we hope to support
with (supplemented) Stribic fellowships; the others we hope to support with
University Fellowship funds.
Return to the index of unit summaries
l:\ir\Outcomes\OA0102\gradmath.doc
|
