News
IMPACT Begins its Third Year
By Justin Snyder
Carpet cutting. That is what one talented math student did over a summer to provide enough money to put him through the math program at BYU.
This student went on and earned the Orson Pratt Award given by the math department his senior year. Jeffrey Humpherys of the Mathematics Department said this student had to take a job cutting carpets because the department had no money to support him in summer studies.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) was looking for an approach to introducing undergraduates to research and offered a grant to universities who could design a program with this goal in mind.
The Mathematics and Statistics departments joined forces and secured the grant for BYU, and the IMPACT program was born providing a greater opportunity for students with research interests in Mathematics and Statistics.
“We have designed a program in order for undergraduate students to gain a real research experience in the collaborative areas of mathematics, statistics and computer science so they can contribute in a research environment at an early stage of their education” said Shane Reese, co-director of the IMPACT program.
The BYU IMPACT program is entering its third year by placing a set of 14 students through “boot camp,” the largest group of students the program has seen thus far.
“The program is broken into three different phases,” Reese said. “The first phase is where the students go through intensive training. It is basically eight graduate-level mathematics and statistics classes in the seven weeks of summer term. They are in class four hours a day, every day, and then they have challenging homework assignments that carry them through the evening. Also, they often spend late nights and weekends working on their homework assignments.”
Once students complete the rigorous boot camp, they begin the second phase, the research portion of the IMPACT program. This year’s 14 accepted students are paired with mentors and work one-on-one with them in formulating their research problems.
“And the last phase is getting some results written up,” Reese said. They “write a paper for a peer reviewed statistical or a mathematical outlet and present at professional conferences where most of the other presenters are faculty members from other universities.”
Now that the IMPACT program is entering its third year, the directors are looking forward to the various ways this program could help other universities and educational programs.
“The NSF wants a national model for how to create a program that will attract and retain students in the mathematical sciences,” Humpherys said. “We are trying to build this national model, putting together a textbook and a lot of lecture materials, fine-tuning this boot camp process, , and trying to have all the materials ready so we can actually export this to other universities.”
Above all, this program is designed to aid students’ futures as they pursue other interests in mathematics, statistics, finance, economics and other related fields
“Our position is: you should approach these interests with strong computational, mathematical, and statistical ability in order to have the upper hand when you go onto graduate school” Humpherys said. “The future of our economy depends largely on our ability to innovate in science and technology.”
*Daily Universe 1 July 2009. See original article here.