Elizabeth Day, Student
Math, Brown
Why I Chose Stanford
I chose Stanford because it offers iCME; a program specific to computational math, which is what I'm interested in. At all other schools I applied to, I was applying to the math or computer science departments because they had no such department. I thought that being in a program specific to my wants would be better because there are so many classes and opportunities geared to the specific field I am interested in.
My Background
I earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Brown University in Applied Mathematics. As an undergrad, I spent one summer at an REU at Mississippi State working on a project on wave propagation in non-homogeneous materials. The following summer I did research for my advisor at Brown in which I applied the method of snap-shots, i.e. Partial Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), to bat flight. Simultaneously, I was organizing a science outreach for under-privileged junior high and high school students, meant to encourage scientific interest and provide an outlet for those already excited and eager to learn more. I brought the students to Brown and gave them an introduction to virtual reality by giving them a tour through Brown's virtual reality CAVE.
The following semester in school, I continued working with POD, but applied it to studying ocean currents in the New Jersey Bight. Upon graduating in December, I continued to work on that project until May as a paid research assistant, all the while maintaining my outreach work and training someone to take over for me after I left.
What Do You Work On
This past quarter (my first quarter) I worked (under Prof. Eric Darve) with a Ph.D. student, Song Li, to convert code he wrote for his Ph.D. thesis into parallel (MPI).
What's Great About Studying Here
The people in the program are considerably less nerdy than I had anticipated (But still nerdy enough that they appreciate my nerdy jokes). They're all great to work with and very organized about arranging study groups. It's great! All the professors I have come in contact with thus far, seem to be very accessible and approachable and earnestly concerned with our progress. Plus, the weather is also awesome and the campus is very pretty. Even when you're super stressed and very tired, the bike-ride to the office is usually very enjoyable-makes it hard to be in a bad mood (plus, everyone actually rides bikes and it's totally nostalgic of childhood).
What Advice Would You Give Prospective Students
Make sure to visit every University you are considering. I know I had a mental list of the order of my favorites, but after I visited, that list got shifted around quite a bit. While you're there, make sure to ask/notice how happy the grad students seem to be. If they're unhappy, chances are, you will be too. See if you can find any statistics about how many people are admitted to the program vs. how many actually graduate. Some programs make it a standard that they make it fairly easy to get in, but will only graduate 40%, which often lends to a cut-throat (and miserable) work environment.
If you know you want to work with a particular professor, make sure to contact him/her to see if they are interested in taking on new students, and also talk to their current students to see how they like working with them. Also, calculate the proportion of how long they have been at the University to how many students they have graduated; big number = bad news.
Look for scholarships you can apply for while researching programs you're interested in. If you get outside funding, there is little reason to turn you down.
What I Hope To Do After Graduation
Be a professor and a mom.