Research Introduction
Introduction
As students of mathematics, it is very easy to fall into the idea that mathematics is something that was figured out a long time ago. On the contrary, mathematics is full of constantly growing knowledge and new ideas! Mathematicians write books and papers, give talks, or create posters and other kinds of presentations to explain these new ideas and developments to each other and the broader scientific community.
One of the amazing opportunities you should consider taking advantange of at CSUF is the chance to interact with faculty to work on research projects in mathematics! The goal of this module is to give a math research-type experience in our class, which comes much closer than anything one would get in a typical math class.
Get to know your team!
You will be part of a team of 2-3 students in the class. Take some time to get to know them!
- What are their interests, and do they have common interests?
- What skill do they bring to the table? Maybe one student knows a bit of coding. Maybe another knows how to really nice drawings or digital graphics. Maybe someone is really good at presenting or creating online videos.
- What part of the class was the most interesting part so far?
Research timeline
This project will last from now until the end of the semester and is lengthy, so it will involve a lot of checkpoints.
The timeline for our in-class research project is the following.
| task | timeline |
|---|---|
| get to know your team | 10/25 |
| choose research question | 10/25 |
| first one-on-one meeting | 10/30-11/05 |
| second one-on-one meeting | 11/06-11/12 |
| third one-on-one meeting | 11/13-11/19 |
| first written report draft | 11/20 |
| second written report draft | 11/31 |
| poster creation in class | 12/01 and 12/06 |
| final written report due | 12/06 |
| mock poster conference | 12/08 |
- For each of the three one-on-one meetings, your group will be responsible for scheduling a time to meet with me outside of class to talk about your progress in exploring the question that you picked. During our meetings, we will talk about the current direction of your project and I will try to provide the best advice that I can in order to avoid dead-ends. Ultimately, just as in real research, the progress your group makes on the project will depend on your effort, creativity, skill, and even luck!
- I will give feedback on each of your groups research reports. As seen above you will have two report drafts for the final draft, and it is expected that you will be still exploring the problem and updating the results in the meantime.
- We will have time during multiple classes to create a research poster presenting our results in class. We will also have a discussion about what presenting research in a poster is like, what the expectations are, and good conference etiquette.
- On the last day of class, we will have a research poster conference where each student group will present their posters and results.
Evaluation
Whenever your question is interesting, performing real research is challenging and can be intimidating. There’s always the potential that despite your best effort, you do not make as much progress as you want on a particular problem. That’s okay! Each of the research questions provided has the potential to go in many directions and every group should be able to make some progress in one direction or another, with a little help. Your evaluation in this is based on successfully completing the checkpoints above, the quality of the final report and poster presentation, the participation of each member in their research group, and in participating and engaging in meetings and the final poster conference. Each checkpoint will be evaluated with a grade supplied in the Seminars/Research component on Canvas.