Recruiting and Outreach
The VIGRE program has been discontinued. Although these webpages are still made available for historical interest, the information available should be considered out of date.
Purdue's VIGRE proposal included a commitment to recruit graduate students to the mathematical sciences.
Purdue Math and Stat faculty have fanned out across the country to give highly polished recruiting lectures to gatherings of undergraduates at many universities, including several historically black institutions. The lectures are on mathematical topics of particular beauty, with time left at the end to describe the graduate school experience in math and stat and the career opportunities for mathematicians that abound in this era of high technology.
Our faculty have been surprised to learn how little undergraduates know about the nature of graduate study. In particular, undergraduates are often shocked to learn that graduate study in mathematics is virtually "free" because teaching assistant packages invariably include tuition plus a stipend. The PhD qualifier exam system and the magnitude of the PhD thesis research effort also come as news.
The recruiting talks are first and foremost designed to inspire undergraduates to study mathematics further. However, we do take the opportunity to pass out our glossy Purdue Math Recruiting Brochures. This has helped us to recruit the many exceptional VIGRE Fellows that have joined our program since the inception of VIGRE at Purdue.
Some of the recruiting lectures have had repeat performances in our VIGRE Liftoff Seminar.
We also hold a recruiting weekend each March at Purdue to induce graduate students from North America who have been admitted to the PhD program to accept admittance. Many of our current VIGRE and GAANN Fellows attended such a weekend event. This fall, we have been pleased to find that our senior VIGRE Fellows are willing, if not eager, to give recruiting lectures at their alma maters. We will send them there on an all expenses paid trip.
We have recently realized that the recruiting lectures that our faculty have been giving are too valuable a commodity to distribute so thinly in North America. We have begun to publish the best of these lectures on Purdue's web pages at Invitation to mathematics as part of Purdue's commitment to perform educational outreach.
We also publish our Problem of the Week on the web and have found that it is getting world-wide attention, including attention from high school students in Indiana. This long-standing series of problems remains in the capable hands of Professor Emeritus Michael Golomb. The Problem of the Week is a Purdue tradition and it is a form of outreach that we are very proud of.
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