News
IMPACT Boot Camp: Math Department Begins New Program
By Paul Sabey
Preparing young men and women for military combat requires intense training. Just as the armed forces utilize a boot camp to train their troops, a research group in the BYU Mathematics Department developed its own boot camp to prepare students to tackle many of the world's problems.
BYU professor Jeffrey Humpherys recently helped develop a program called IMPACT (Interdisciplinary Mentoring Program in Analysis, Computation and Theory), along with professors Shane Reese and Dennis Tolley, that prepares undergraduate students to do research that solves problems in a wide variety of fields using advanced math, statistics and computation. The program is primarily funded by a prestigious $700,000 grant awarded to the math and statistics departments by the National Science Foundation.
A select group of mathematics and statistics students were recently accepted into the IMPACT program and are in the throes of "boot camp."
"Our students work all day and often into the night on really intensive projects, doing graduate level mathematics," Humpherys said. "We have a strong commitment to undergraduate research, but the purpose of the boot camp is to get them to the point to where they are actually able to work on their own."
The students enroll in a six-credit course during the summer term, where they learn the advanced math and statistics they will need to complete their research. According to Humpherys, the students spend up to 70 hours per week in class, doing homework and solving problems. There are social activities as well.
"This program will really help us get ahead and prepare for graduate school and future employment," said Taylor Redd, a student in the IMPACT program.
"They spend this time becoming close friends; helping each other, investing in each other and strengthening one another and that is what BYU is all about," Humpherys said. "They have caught onto the spirit of the program and are genuinely interested in helping each other."
Once the students complete boot camp, they begin their research projects in a variety of interdisciplinary scientific fields. The students are paid for their work through grant money and the generosity of private donors.
"The projects range from studying viruses through an electron microscope to calculating an algorithm that determines the interest rates at banks," IMPACT administrative assistant Jake Mattison said.
The IMPACT program is catching the eye of other universities as well.
"BYU is a national leader in undergraduate research," Humpherys said. "We have been doing it well for years. There is another grant in place in the math department to export our model to teach other universities how to do undergraduate research."
*BYU NewsNet 28 July 2008