Internships and Undergraduate Research Opportunities
The number of opportunities for undergraduate research in the mathematics department has dramatically increased recently. More and more faculty are hiring students as research assistants on research projects. In addition, since the 1996-97 academic year, money has been set aside annually for an Undergraduate Research Grant Competition. Students can write up a proposal, with a faculty member for guidance, to compete for a portion of the $20,000 available in this fund. In addition, a new college level undergraduate research grant began during the 1998-1999 academic year. The number of opportunities for students interested in undergraduate research continues to grow.
Opportunities for internships have also exploded in the recent past. Places where our students are interning include Argonne National Lab, Motorola, Postalsoft, the National Science Foundation, NASA and others. For both the research and internship opportunities, a mathematics/computer science double major or major/minor combination has been an especially good combination. If you would like to get involved in a research project or internship in the future, don't put off taking your upper level mathematics courses. The most common time for either a research project or an internship is the summer following your third year. In order to be competitive, you will want to have a wide variety of mathematics courses and probably some computer science courses completed by that time.
