Barbara's Projects

I worked with Junko (Fall 2002) and with Rochus (Spring 2003) to organize the Graduate Student Seminar Series (GSSS), which was held biweekly around lunchtime, with pizza and drinks provided. Please see the Web page for the list of speakers and abstracts. Here I describe the work by listing the tasks one needs to perform to successively organize the seminar series, so that future organizers will know what to do. (Of course, they might find better ideas!)
  1. Find speakers. Send out an email message to matgrd asking for volunteers. Personally asking specific people who might be ready to give a talk seems to work best.
  2. Make room reservations by contacting Irina Long. It is great to have a regular lunchtime seminar, but you will probably have to vary the time to accomodate speakers and participants.
  3. Let the speaker know that s/he needs to provide you with a title and abstract (by email) a week or two before the seminar date in order to advertise. Also find out what equipment they might need (overhead projector, laptop, proxima, blackboard).
  4. Provide Bruce Long with the date, time, speaker name, title, and abstract for Agora advertisement, and provide Debbie Olson with this information so that she can make the flyers to be put in grad student mailboxes. This should occur about a week before the seminar date. Ask Renate or Stephanie for the availability of laptop and proxima, if needed.
  5. Buy the ice and drinks. You can get reimbursed by Mary Sabel, if you save the receipt.
  6. Ask Debbie to order the pizza and remind her to print and distribute the flyers a few days before the seminar.
  7. On the day before the seminar, send a reminder e-mail to matgrd.
  8. Get ice into freezer at department office, also bring drinks. Intercept pizza delivery to math department 20 minutes before the seminar, bring plates, cups, drinks, ice, pizza, and garbage bag to the reserved room. You can borrow a cart from the department office.
  9. Get the ID and signature of audience. Clean up!
  10. Update web page. 

I worked with Junko to organize the Faculty Panel on Research Opportunities in Math and Statistics at ASU for Math Awareness Month. Please see the web page for a list of speakers and abstracts. This work involved inviting faculty members to make short presentations to students about their research. We tried to find at least one person from each area of research strength in the department. We scheduled a room for two hours at a time that was convenient for most people (3:40-5:30pm) and set up a schedule, giving each professor ten minutes to speak. We obtained titles from each speaker and advertised the event through Agora, flyers in mailboxes, and by email. It was necessary to organize the loading of powerpoint presentations onto a laptop computer beforehand, so that the sequencing of speakers was uninterrupted during the event. We moderated the event by introducing the speakers, timing the presentations, letting the speakers know when their time was up, and by helping with equipment. Everyone seemed to appreciate the opportunity to learn about the excellent research going on in the department.

I arranged to participate in the REU program at NAU, but deferred my trip until June 2004. The report on that comes later.