The Graduate Program

The graduate program within the Mathematics Department is thriving. The number of doctoral degrees awarded by the Department has reached record levels over the last two years with 14 awarded in 2007 and 12 awarded in 2008. Recent graduates have accepted positions at top research universities such as Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, Princeton, Rice, Stanford and Pennsylvania; others are working at companies such as Microsoft and Samsung; and still others are teaching at local schools including Green River Community College and Seattle University. The program’s success is the combined result of our graduate students’ hard work and talent, the tireless dedication of the Department’s faculty, and the fruition of a comprehensive recruitment and retention plan that was initiated a decade ago.

The plan begins with a multi-pronged effort to improve the quality of our entering classes by enhancing our recruitment efforts. Each application is carefully evaluated by the Graduate Admissions Committee. We use funds from the Graduate School, together with internal departmental funds, to support visits of our top candidates. During these visits, in addition to meeting with our Director of Graduate Admissions, each applicant is paired up with one of our advanced graduate students. These students are in an excellent position to both inform the applicant about the Department from the students’ perspective and provide heartfelt and compelling publicity for our program.

Our recruitment strategy has been a dramatic success. The number of applicants to our program has steadily increased from a low of about 110 in 1998 to at least 250 in each of the last three years. This has allowed us to be increasingly selective in our admissions policy. We typically admit about fifteen Doctoral students as well as a few Master’s students each year. Some of our Master’s students have successfully transitioned into the Ph.D program; others have used the Master’s degree as a springboard to jobs in a wide range of industries. Our graduate enrollment has increased to approximately 90 students, the maximum number we can fully support with our current resources.

Once our students arrive on campus, they quickly become immersed in our extensive advising and mentoring program, which has been designed to help them to succeed both in teaching and in navigating through the graduate program. All new students and teaching assistants attend an orientation and TA training program, and each of them meets individually with the Graduate Program Coordinator and with a separate faculty advisor to map out a course of study. In addition, new students are mentored by experienced TAs during their first quarter of teaching. The advising and mentoring of students (by multiple faculty members in numerous roles) continues throughout our program.

The Department sponsors numerous courses and activities designed to acquaint students with current research in mathematics, as well as with current topics related to the profession. The Department organizes monthly colloquia which bring internationally recognized speakers to the Department as well as several seminars in specialized fields.

The graduate students organize the Current Topics Seminar, where faculty and advanced graduate students make their own research accessible to beginning graduate students. In addition to formal talks, the Department sponsors graduate student lunches with the colloquium speakers and “brown-bag lunches” to discuss issues related to the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Developing a comprehensive support package to guarantee adequate financial support to our students has been crucial to our recruitment strategy. Most of our top applicants receive offers from leading universities that include financial incentives beyond their base TA salary, which in turn is often significantly greater than ours. In recent years we have been able to promise an attractive 11-month salary for a minimum of five years, subject to making satisfactory progress toward the Ph.D. To fund this plan we have to call upon all sources of funding available to us: resources coming from the Graduate School at UW and outside sources such as the National Science Foundation, the ARCS Foundation, and the Microsoft Corporation, as well as internal departmental funds. The majority of these sources are temporary and vulnerable, so an important long-term goal for the Department is to stabilize the plan with permanent endowment-based funding. This will allow us to strengthen and improve the core aspects of our program as we build for continued success in the years to come.

Daniel Pollack