Joint Meeting at San Diego

Conference Report -- Joint Meeting at San Diego, Jan. 2002 The two main reasons for attending Joint Meeting are that I wanted to gain some interview experiences and know what kind of interesting classes can be developed in undergraduate. I think that I did achieve both of them, although I didn't really get any campus interviews followed by screen interview at San Diego. However, I did start to experience how to response to those represents from schools and what kind of problems can be expected in interview. It is still hard for me to understand how different undergraduate circu can be between universities in US. I did see several interesting classes. When I learned the fact of descent number of math major from some schools which I had interview with. I felt that developing some interesting math classes is probably the best way to attract students. -- Industrial Math Conference at Utah, March 2002 This conference gave me totally different experiences from INFORM and Joint Meeting. Not only the conference has different feature but also I had a opportunity to give a talk there. The organizer of this conference invited a few researchers from industry and a few professors involving deeply with industry. There are several things I learned from this conference: 1. Because of the confidential issue, some industrial researchers couldn't reveal detail of their research. This may still be an issue when academic researchers collaborate with industrial companies. 2. Prof. Bogdan Vernescu from Worcester Polytechnic Institute caught most people's attention because of their successful relationship with local industrial companies. It is really hard to build up such relationship. 3. The third thing I learned is how preparation of a presentation/talk is important. Although I did give several talks in different seminars in department, this is my first time to give a talk in a conference. When giving a talk, the first thing is to find out who are your audience. This becomes even more important when going through interviews. The second thing is to keep time in mind. Do not go over time. In many cases, the organizer informs the speaker one or two minutes before the time ends. Two types of comment may be given when the speaker takes much more time than he/she supposes to. One is that the speaker doesn't prepare. The other one is that the speaker is not familiar with the material so that he/she can not decide which part to skip. Those are not good situations especially for new Ph.D. However, this can be overcome by practice.