Jobs, Undergraduate Research, Teaching

Watch the Williams Career Center. AfterCollege.com has a monthly listing of job opportunities for Williams math majors.

Every student considering math graduate school should apply for an NSF Graduate Fellowship. For more, start with Fellowships on the AMS Grad Student Blog. The Ford Foundation has graduate fellowships for underrepresented minority students. Goldwater Scholarship applications deadline January 8.

Want to study abroad? Consider a Budapest Semester in Mathematics or Math in Moscow, for which AMS Scholarships are available.

Semester at Penn State applications due April 10.

Semester in Environmental Science at Woods Hole.

Finance internship with Dave Kane ’88.

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

SMALL. Spend the summer at Williams doing group research with Williams Math/Stats faculty. More information and applications (due early February).

For other summer undergraduate research sites, search the web, see the AMS listing, see our listing, see Velez’s list of programs with special features, and see the following:

Texas A&M has a Pre-REU and bridge programs to graduate school for current juniors and seniors.

Berkeley undergraduate research program summer 2010, especially for underrepresented groups, due February 28.

The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program invites women to participate in a post baccalaureate summer enrichment program designed to enhance their ability to successfully complete graduate programs in the mathematical sciences. Application deadline February 15.

Metrology REU.

CMU Image Processing.

CalTech for underrepresented students.

Interdisciplinary Program in High Performance Computing at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Nebraska Summer Research Program

RIPS is an REU-like program that has teams of students working on projects that were proposed by industrial partners. The program started on the UCLA campus and now exists in three places: UCLA, Beijing, Berlin. All three programs are conducted in English. The US program (in LA) is open to international students. Applications must be submitted by February 15.

TEACHING

Get involved with the Williams chapter of Students for Education Reform (SfER) and talk to Dr. Susan Engel, Director of the Williams Program in Teaching.

Articles in The Christian Science Monitor list four key elements of teacher training: classroom work, local curriculum, course work in the discipline, study of learning practices. Wanted: More Science and Math Teachers.” School officials hope financial and training incentives will help fill the need for 200,000 teachers…read more from The Christian Science Monitor, December 29, 2008.

Wediko staff opportunities for summer programs for kids.

Teach for America.

Fellowship for Aspiring Teachers of Color. Seniors contact Molly Magavern by October 9th if interested. Also see Sponsors for Educational Opportunity.

Math for America fellowships for teaching high school in New York City and elsewhere: applications are due in early February. Math for America provides tuition + $30,000 stipend the first year, and a $20,000 stipend in addition to salary in subsequent years.

Teach Kentucky, supported by Williams alums, also has a Field Guide for surviving that first difficult year.

99 Excellent Advice Sites for Teachers

The Williams Record (Nov 11, 2009) carried a piece by Matt Simonson ’08, “A First-time Teacher’s Insight”:

…The teaching hiring process was intimidating…I did have one thing going for me…math teachers are in high demand.

…I’m working just as hard as I was at Williams, but now it’s for someone else’s future, not just my own…

Simson

FOR TODAY’S GRADUATE, JUST ONE WORD: STATISTICS

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found.

“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.

Now [she] works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.

Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician… They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data.

The New York Times
Published: August 5, 2009

About Frank Morgan:

Frank Morgan works in minimal surfaces and has published 200 articles and six books. He is currently Atwell Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Williams College.