UD’s SIAM Student Chapter Rocked the 2018-19 Year!

Over the past couple of years, our SIAM student chapter at UD has expanded its membership base, participated in several new community service activities, and found novel ways to further enhance the experience and professional development of the graduate students here in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. During my tenure as president in the 2018-2019 academic year, our Executive Board's mission was to continue to find ways to strengthen the graduate student experience, and I would like to share with you some of our accomplishments from the last year. 

Early in 2018, the Delaware Science Olympiad (DSO) reached out to us for help for one of their new events, "Fermi Problems."  With the help of 6 graduate students, our student chapter hosted a Fermi Problems workshop to prepare high school student for the event and then constructed and administered the exam on the day of the Olympiad. Following that success, we were eager to participate again.  Our involvement for the 2019 DSO expanded to 15 graduate students and 4 events over two separate days: Fermi Problems, Geologic Mapping, Code Busters, and Game On. The high school students' showed great passion and enthusiasm, which made working at the event very meaningful for us.  We plan to expand our role to help the DSO, and we can't wait to find more ways to help these budding scientists and mathematicians develop their abilities and dedication towards these subjects. 

One of the biggest goals of our Executive Board this year was to find ways to help students develop professionally. One of the ways we did this was to invite a SIAM Fellow, Dr. Lois Curfman McInnes of Argonne National Laboratory to give a talk to our department and to meet with graduate students. She discussed her research on community software ecosystems and shared her insight into the world of industry and laboratory work.  We two organized two more events this year in conjunction with the Robotics group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering to foster interdisciplinary research and to socialize between departments. 

Continuing in this vein, our board constructed and continually updated a list of local and relevant conferences to make students aware of avenues to present their research to the public and academics outside UD. We also compiled a database of graduate students' research interests and made this publically available to the graduate students, faculty, and the public to promote collaboration and mutually benefit from the expertise of others and to help direct prospective students to appropriate current graduate students who are researching in fields that are of interest to them.

 Lastly, we had several lunch meetings this year where we relaxed and planned the events for the coming year; and no semester would be complete without a social event! In October, the chapter went apple picking at the nearby Milburn Orchard, where we picked some incredibly crisp apples and marveled at the topology of the decedent apple cider donuts.

If you would like to stay abreast with our chapter, we have posted these databases, the now updated FunGuide, and other information on our new website at https://sites.udel.edu/math-siam/.