National Service through Math

Original design for the "Be Patriotic" poster by Paul Stahr, 1917-18. Public Domain, from Wikipedia

Original design for the “Be Patriotic” poster by Paul Stahr, 1917-18. Public Domain, from Wikipedia

Math-ional Service? Two thoughts lead to one blog today. First: the recent political conventions (and non-stop political coverage for the last year before the conventions) have got me thinking about government and public service. The ideal of government is to serve the public. We all participate in government in a basic way when we vote, but surely there are other ways that citizens (like, say, mathematicians) can serve each other and the world through involvement in government. Second thought: once in a while, I want to do something else. I mean, do a job other than math professor. Occasionally, I want to do ANYTHING but be a math professor. Generally I am just looking for a temporary change, so I can use the skills that make me a good professor in a different way, or towards different goals… like maybe serving the public through working with the US government! Luckily, there are actually opportunities to do this as a professor. This blog is devoted to some government service opportunities for academic PhD mathematicians.

You may have heard of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowships. These are year-long fellowships open to professional researchers and educators with PhDs from any STEM field (master’s degrees in Engineering are also ok). The program accepts applicants to work in seven different areas to help with government policy related to science in technology. Fellows are based in Washington DC and receive a 75,000100,000 stipend plus benefits—this is a viable job for a full year. There are both congressional and executive branch fellowships available. The AMS sponsors one congressional fellowship each year specifically for a mathematician.

People do this program at many different stages of math life—early career, sabbatical, or transitioning out of academic mathematics. This work is right in line with my interests, so I applied for the Science and Technology Policy Fellowship two years ago. The application process is outlined on the website above. If you are chosen as a semi-finalist (I was), you will do a video-conference interview. Before my interview I was asked to write a briefing memo, explaining an area in which my expertise would be helpful to a policy maker. The people on the interview panel were very engaging. We talked about the memo I’d written and my interests in math and public policy. I have to say that the interview was a positive experience in itself. Though I was eventually became a finalist, I received an offer from Villanova at the same time, so I didn’t actually get to participate in the program. However, I think this fellowship is fantastic and I hope I get the chance to do this at some point in my career.

Another opportunity that gets less press is the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) Centers for Communication and Computing summer program for faculty, known as SCAMP. The Center for Communications Research has two offices, one in Princeton, NJ, the other in La Jolla, CA. Each summer these centers run 10-week summer workshops in which visiting and permanent researchers work on problems of interest to the government, including “cryptography, cryptanalysis, algorithms, high-performance computing, information processing, signal processing, and network security, as well as related areas of pure and applied mathematics,” according the CCR website.  I talked to several people who have gone to SCAMPs, and they reported really enjoying the problems and collaborative atmosphere. One thing to consider is that attending these workshops requires obtaining a security clearance, which is not a quick (or necessarily easy) process. It probably makes sense to start working on this early in the fall if you are interested in attending the following summer. If you are interested in joining a SCAMP, email CCR La Jolla or CCR Princeton for more information.

Finally, an opportunity that gets incredibly little press: the Defense Science Study Group (DSSG). I recently heard about it from an alumnus who had a great experience in the program. An internet search made the DSSG seem very mysterious—I found a few references from alumni (including this and this), but very little official information. (Apparently there is a real website, which was down but will hopefully be up again soon.) Here’s the general idea: the DSSG is a group of science and engineering professors that meet/go on adventures for approximately 20 days per year for two years. A new class is chosen every two years from a field of faculty nominated by their home universities. The participants learn about national security issues, from active US government security personnel. As their brochure explains, “Group members interact with top-level officials from the Department of Defense (DoD), and other Government organizations, various Intelligence agencies, The White House, and Congress. Visits to military bases throughout the United States provide members with a unique perspective of operating forces and allow DSSG members to meet with senior commanders responsible for our nation’s defense. Tours of defense laboratories and industrial facilities provide further insight into the technical dimensions of national security.”

The goal of this program is to forge connections between scientists and engineers and the national security community, and to encourage academic scientists and engineers to contribute their knowledge to addressing national security issues. It is administered by IDA and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). For a math professor with strong national security interests, who is interested in doing things like flying in military planes and visiting aircraft carriers, this program would be a perfect fit. However, individuals can’t directly apply for this program. To get into the program, you need to be nominated by someone, usually an official at your university (like a provost). While some institutions have internal application processes, many do not. Some provosts may not know about this opportunity or may not have considered nominating a mathematician for it. With that in mind, the alum I talked to suggested that if you are interested you should definitely contact your provost about a nomination. Recruitment for the next two-year class begins this September/October.

Of course, programs like these are not the only math-related ways to serve/effect change in government. You could always just go to Congress, Mr. Smith style. The Association for Women in Mathematics is doing this (okay, visiting congressional offices, not addressing Congress). In 2015, the AWM leadership and student chapter members visited Capitol Hill offices to meet with congressional staffers. Georgia College students, from a chapter led by Dr. Marcela Chiorescu, describe their group’s experience in DC in this press release. Villanova’s AWM student chapter is hoping to visit congressional offices this December—so excited about this!

Are there more programs out there? Other ideas on how to serve or get involved? Let me know in the comments!

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What is the scholarship of teaching and learning, anyway?

Like my co-blogger, and probably many of you, I’ve not been writing as much as I hoped this summer. One of my goals is to finally wrap up this project I’ve done on improving my students’ calculus understanding that’s been on the back burner for a few months.

But instead of doing that right now, I thought I’d summarize what I learned before I set out to do this project.

I have basically no formal training in mathematics education. I never took anything close to a research methods class, and somehow even dodged elementary stats until I ended up teaching (and loving) it. But I’m interested in helping my students learn better, and to make sure I’m actually doing that, I want to try to measure that somehow. And as long as I’m doing that, I might as well write up my results so other people can try what works and avoid what doesn’t.

What I’ve described is basically my understanding of the definition of the scholarship of teaching and learning (or SOTL for the acronym crowd). It contrasts somewhat with research in undergraduate mathematics education (RUME) in that it’s perhaps less formal and less theoretical, and more likely to be done by a mathematician whose primary research may not be mathematics education.

b1ddb15c77b5ddbf6f033bc1eee1aed6My main guide in forming and executing this project has been the excellent book by Jaqueline Dewar and Curtis Bennett, Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It covers everything from designing a reasonable project to finding an appropriate journal. The book also gives example surveys and rubrics that have been extensively used in other studies, explains how to deal with the lack of an ideal control group (whatever that is), how to deal with qualitative data, and includes many example SoTL projects to study.

One aspect of the work I was concerned about, but which turned out to not be a big deal, was getting through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. Pretty much any study on humans requires adhering to strict safety, disclosure, and privacy rules. Even starting this process requires fairly lengthy online training sessions first that explain the process and the relevant laws. There are a couple of different ones, and you should check with your institution to see which one they require. At my previous institution my chair had to go through the training as well.

After the training, IRB approval requires some significant paperwork which again depends on your institution. The nice thing with typical SoTL research is that our experiments usually deal with data like test scores or surveys, and nothing invasive or potentially harmful. This means every IRB I’ve written so far has fallen under the Exempt category. That doesn’t mean it’s exempt from all paperwork, but it usually means the process is significantly shorter and easier. Every study I’ve submitted has required very little revision and been pretty quick, but again, this will depend strongly on your institution and who is on the board. I found my friends in psychology and sociology to be very helpful in writing these applications.

In future posts I’ll go through how I went about reviewing known literature, designing my experiment, collecting and coding my data, writing it up and (fingers crossed) getting it published.

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The Grant Cycle Diaries: Grantastination and Broader Impacts

phdprocrastination

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com

Dear Diary,

July 22 is the due date for this cycle’s NSF CAREER grant. This is nine days away, and I have nine full days of stuff that I still need to do. This is stressful. I take partial blame for my plight—it seems I cannot do today what could be done tomorrow. In January, I was thrilled to read this article about the creative benefits of procrastination. It turns out that in some situations, you will have more creative ideas if you let your mind wander for a while before getting down to work on a task. As a natural procrastinator, it was great to have behavioral psychology cut me a break for once. However, there is no denying that procrastination makes many if not most situations in life much more difficult. Through great effort I have managed to moderate my procrastination to some degree, to trick myself into starting important projects appropriately early, and to generally be a somewhat productive member of society. The struggle continues every day.

But I really did start early on this grant application! My favorite trick for getting started is to sign up for some kind of structured (and hopefully social) program. With that in mind, this February I attended re:boot Number Theory, a grant writing workshop/bootcamp at Duke University, aimed mostly at female number theorists. We spent 3 full days working on our own proposals, as well as learning about NSA (National Security Agency) and NSF (National Science Foundation) grants from previous applicants and representatives from the agencies. Although I had applied for the NSA Young Investigator grant twice, I had no idea how many additional aspects were involved in the NSF grant. The workshop was incredibly helpful because it provided

  1. All the official information you could possibly want about the programs.
  2. Great, patient people to answer the ridiculous number of questions that arise in working on one of these.
  3. Structure and dedicated time for getting started on each aspect of the application.
  4. Moral support from other people who are also attempting this same difficult and discouraging task.
  5. A useful guilt trip—we were all asked to pledge that we would applying for at least one grant in the 2016 funding cycle as a condition on our attendance.

I pledged to apply for the CAREER grant. If you are annoyed by this kind of thing, you may find it upsetting that CAREER is treated like an acronym but it definitely doesn’t stand for anything: the official name is the Faculty Early Career Development Program. Coming to terms with the non-acronym is the first and least difficult step of the application process. The CAREER grant is for non-tenured Assistant Professors who are in tenure-track positions. It is a 5-year program, with a minimum award of $400,000. This should support both an extensive research program and an educational component, which helps to provide “broader impact.”

CAREER grants are very competitive, so I almost feel like I’m overreaching by applying, but I hate even writing that, because I hate the idea of one of my students or colleagues feeling that they are “not good enough” to even apply for something. Ugh! So much tangled impostor syndrome and negative thinking there. Also, people are 100% right when they say “the one [blank] you definitely won’t get is the [blank] you don’t apply for.” This is not what I want to hear when I’m looking for an excuse not to do something, but it is true. Also, I want women to receive a fair proportion of these grants, and it seems likely that a larger percentage of female applicants would result in a larger percentage of female awardees.

Starting out, I felt ready because I had all the materials from my NSA grant application. I worked hard at the bootcamp, worked on the application a lot more through the spring, got in touch with my University’s and College’s research offices, made a budget, patted myself on the back for being ahead of the game, and then… ARGH! It’s nine days before the proposal is due and I am nowhere close to done! Almost nothing is all the way finished! I still need to get letters from 10 different collaborators attesting that they will work with me if I do get the grant. I still need to address several important questions in my proposal, like how I will evaluate the educational component, and why 5 years is the right amount of time for the proposed work.

Why? Why didn’t I do these things earlier? I console myself with the fact that I really did do many things early, but I had many other things to do, and there are just many, many pieces of a grant application, which take an extraordinary amount of time to assemble. And I know that because I care about these projects, I will keep putting time in until I am satisfied with everything, which will never happen, so in some sense it is actually impossible for me to be done ahead of time. Working up until the last minute doesn’t always mean procrastination—sometimes it just means going overboard. I will be working hard for the next week to get everything in order, but even if I had more done, it would still take me all week to do the rest.

Right now I am working on polishing up the educational/broader impact components of my proposal. The following slides, from a November 2015 NSF talk about the CAREER program, give a general idea of what they say they are looking for in education/broader impacts.

Slide1GrantSlide2Grant

Many people that I talked to had a very easy time outlining their research plans but struggled to come up with broader impacts that they found exciting. My experience with this was different: I found thinking of broader impact ideas to be incredibly fun, and couldn’t stop once I got started. I had a list of ideas much longer than I could use and had pare down to a realistic and cohesive plan. It seems important to match your real educational interests, to integrate the education with the research component, and to propose something that will not take a ridiculous amount of time away from your research and the rest of your regular job at your institution. At the workshop, we brainstormed some more specific activities that could meet these criteria. Here are just a few of the more popular ideas that people had:

  • Run a speaker series, potentially focusing on women or other underrepresented groups when inviting speakers.
  • Organize a conference, coordinating with/making use of an existing meeting (like the Joint Meetings or a regional AMS meeting) if possible.
  • Contribute to an existing Math Circle, or start your own (many people at the workshop pointed out that starting one can be a lot of work, but could work for you if you are passionate about it!)
  • Organize or give a talk in a science pub lecture series.
  • Write expository articles/introductory notes on advanced material in your research area, especially if there is no introductory textbook available.
  • Write a great math blog.
  • Contribute code to an open source software package like Sage, or make contributions to online math resources like the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

I had better get back to working on the actual application now, but I’d love to hear how other people are doing with their grant applications, and any other great ideas for broader impacts or not procrastinating.

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