Undergraduate Student Travel to Conferences

德州农工大学数学本科荣誉课程的目标之一是鼓励学生继续攻读数学科学研究生院。甚至在数学荣誉课程开始之前，为了支持我们的本科生进行研究，我们以前的VIGRE和我们以前和现在的REU补助金资助学生在地区和国家会议上展示他们的工作。该提案的负责人Sue Geller陪同学生们参加了联合会议、内布拉斯加州女大学生数学会议和MathFest，以帮助他们学会从参加会议中受益。这项拨款的目的是扩大本科生参加会议的计划，以便一些学生可以不做演讲或提交海报。在过去的5年里，我们试行了一个想法，即派一些不参加内布拉斯加州数学本科女性会议的女性参加。这个实验的结果是令人鼓舞的，其中有两个人在没有演讲的情况下，在第二年进行了演讲，其中两人现在在德克萨斯农工大学攻读统计学博士学位，一人是康涅狄格大学的博士生，两人是精算师，三人仍然是数学专业的学生，只有两人（都是年级较低的学生）转到了其他领域，但都是使用数学的领域。总的来说，学生们从会议中回到家，精力充沛地在数学方面表现出色，并继续在数学领域发展。

One goal of the Undergraduate Honors Programs in Mathematics at Texas A\&M University is to encourage students to continue on to graduate school in the mathematical sciences. Even before the start of the Honors Programs in Mathematics, in order to support our undergraduates in research, our previous VIGRE and our previous and current REU grants funded students to present their work at regional and national conferences. The PI of this proposal, Sue Geller, accompanied the students to the Joint Meetings, the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Woman in Mathematics, and MathFest to help them learn to benefit from attending conferences.The purpose of this grant is to expand the program of sending undergraduates to conferences so that some students may go without giving a talk or presenting a poster. In the past 5 years we have piloted the idea of sending a few women who do not present to the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. The results from this experiment are encouraging in that two presented the year after they went without presenting, two are now in the Ph.D. program in statistics at Texas A\&M University, one is a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut, two are actuaries, three are still mathematics majors, and only two, both underclassman, have switched to other fields, but ones that use mathematics. In general, the students come home from the conferences energized to excel at mathematics and to continue in it.