Enhancing the Major-Minor Experience
During the past couple years, we’ve been working to enhance the experience for our math majors and minors by promoting career development, research opportunities, and community.
To provide space for more career conversations, we created a new 1-credit course to explore opportunities and resources for a math major at UT as well as career directions. For me, the highlight of the course are the amazing alumni speakers who share their experiences and advice with our students.
Last fall we also launched our new Math Major Alumni Spotlight program to showcase our math alumni and the variety of career paths they have taken. Our fall 2022 spotlights featured Margaret McDaniel, who is an immunology researcher at University of Washington, Kelly McKeethan, who is a Senior Actuary at Frontdoor, and Helene Rodzevicius, who is Assistant Vice President and Credit Analyst at Mountain Commerce Bank. (If you are a math major alum who would like to participate, please get in touch!)
To promote community, we host a weekly math major social hour. This event has really taken off this year now that covid restrictions have eased and we are able to provide food. We’re also creating opportunities for mathematical fun, such as sending a team of math majors to compete in a math jeopardy competition at a regional conference.
Further, our new UT Puzzler debuted this fall, which is a biweekly problem solving challenge open to anyone at the university. So far, we’ve had submissions from 40 different students, with math major Philip Rosenbalm leading the pack with a correct solution to every UT Puzzler so far. Try your hand at the first UT Puzzler below.
Lastly, we continue to promote undergraduate research in mathematics. This semester, thanks to funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research, we offered a paid position to Kristina Wilson (see photo) as the spring 23 math department research assistant. She is working with Professor Ioannis Sgouralis to develop specialized numerical integration schemes for machine learning and the analysis of biochemistry data.