Reflections on Second Semester, Part 3

This is the third of four posts looking back at the semester that just ended. The posts are split up by class or activity. This post focuses on doing math research and being a NINJA for Linearity I.


 Math Research
In January, I joined a Babson/Olin graph theory research group. There are three professors in the group, two from Babson and one from Olin, though the Olin professor is currently on leave. This semester there were four students in the group: a senior, a junior who has been in the group, a junior who was new to the group, and me. I spent most of my time working with the two professors and Jacques, the junior who had been in the group for a couple of semesters already.

Graph theory is the study of structures called graphs, which are usually represented as some dots called vertices and edges between the vertices. I learned graph theory at Canada/USA Mathcamp during high school and did graph theory research during summer 2011.  During winter break this year, Jacques sent out an email to Olin students asking if anyone was interested in joining the research group, and I replied.

I wasn't really sure what being in the group would be like. I hadn't enjoyed my summer 2011 research, but I'd been working either alone or with one grad student, and only had four weeks to work. I knew I liked graph theory, so I wanted to try research again as part of a group and with more time.

This semester went really well. Working in a group and with more time was better for me. We had a big group meeting on Mondays, and then we worked on our own throughout the week. If we found anything very interesting, we emailed each other about it. Sometime over the weekend, Jacques and I would meet to talk about what we'd done and then do some more work together. Before the meeting on Mondays, one of us would write up our progress to share with the rest of the group.

The problems we work on have to do with labeling the vertices with integers, whereas before I'd done problems about coloring the edges. Jacques and I spent a lot of time coming up with types of graphs and then figuring out how to label them. I presented some of that work at Expo in May. The very first problem we did, though, was actually something the group had been working on for a few months. They had converted a vertex labeling problem into an edge coloring problem, but then they weren't sure what to do from there. Because of the work I'd done before, I was more comfortable with edge coloring, and while playing around with some examples, I found a result that helped us finish the problem. That work became a paper, which is already live online!

I really enjoyed this semester of research, and I'm excited to do it again next year!

Linearity 1 NINJA
Linearity 1 is the math class that second-semester freshmen take. It covers linear algebra and linear differential equation, so students who have taken Linear and DEs before can test out of the class. When I tested out, Aaron asked if I wanted to be a NINJA (teaching assistant), and I said yes.

Linearity met three times a week. I typed up lecture notes in LaTeX on lecture days, and on quiz days I was in one of the classrooms to answer questions or correct any typos on the quiz. The most interesting day of Linearity was studio day. The students were split into three studios, each with a professor and a NINJA. Before studio, the professors would post a problem set on the course website. The students were expected to start working on the pset and then continue to work and ask questions during studio. My job was to walk around the studio, answering questions and helping anyone who was stuck. At first that made me pretty nervous, but over the course of the semester I became more confident in answering questions, and I figured out how much time I needed to spend going over the pset before studio. I also held office hours a couple of times. NINJA hours are generally in the evenings in the dorms. One of the times I held office hours was right after a lecture had been cancelled, so that was a very busy night.

Linearity was only being taught for the second time, and they made a lot of changes from the first year to the second. There were changes during the semester this year, the most notable of which was changing when lecture occurred so that it was more related to what was on the studio problem sets. I expect there will be more changes next year, as well. (This is pretty normal at Olin. Lots of the classes are somewhat experimental.) The NINJAs knew both how the professors wanted the class to be and what the students thought about the class, so we spent a lot of time in February or so talking to the professors about student feedback, and that led to many of the changes.

The last few weeks of the class focused on three-person projects, and I didn't feel like I was as helpful during projects because they were so much more specific. I was only able to answer pretty simple questions unless they were related to vector calc or graph theory. After being in the studio during projects and seeing presentations, I think if I NINJA again next year I would be able to help more.

I'm going to be a NINJA for a couple of math classes next semester, and even though those classes will be on different material I think I'll be more comfortable from the start than I was this semester. I really like explaining math to people, so NINJAing has been a lot of fun.