Student Days at the SIAM Annual Meeting

By Peter Turner

Students now constitute close to 40% of SIAM’s members. Over the past several years, many activities have been added to the Annual Meeting program to enhance students’ experience at the meeting, especially since so many are attending a large meeting for the first time.

So, what can you expect to find at AN14 in Chicago?

Students and faculty at the student chapter breakfast at SIAM’s 2013 Annual Meeting (AN13).

A complete description of Student Days is online here. This post is intended to give you just a taste of some of the highlights. A new addition a couple of years ago was the introduction of a special welcome/ orientation for students on Sunday afternoon, immediately prior to the general welcome reception. Take advantage of that to connect with other students at the meeting, hear more about facilities and events for you, and meet with members of local student chapters who can give advice about activities in the Chicago area. Often one of the local student chapters will arrange some student-specific social events, too. We want you to enjoy both the scientific and social aspects of the meeting.

Another recent addition is the inclusion of a student lounge – usually in or close to the Exhibit Hall. This is a good meeting point, and of course you may invite non-student attendees to join you there. Meeting with non-student attendees is an important networking advantage of any professional meeting. Sometimes it is difficult for students to get “face time” with the invited speakers, and so we have initiated (two years ago) a special “minisymposium” which is restricted to students to meet with as many of the invited plenary session lecturers as can be there. This has become a Student Days highlight.

Student orientation at AN13.

There are also several sessions of talks devoted to student presentations. Here I want to digress to speak to any non-student readers of this post. The quality of these talks is usually extremely high (and they keep on schedule!) and the presentations are often accessible to non-experts. They therefore provide a very good way of finding out about fields that you maybe wish you knew more about. There are sessions devoted to student prize winners (the Student Paper Prize and the Mathematical Contest in Modeling), for representatives of invited Student Chapters, and for highlighting some of the excellent research projects undertaken by undergraduates. I would urge all attendees who can to take advantage of these sessions and support our student members.

For general student oriented information on AN14, see http://www.siam.org/meetings/an14/students.php as well as the Student Days site.

Peter Turner is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Clarkson University.