Homework 2

Assignment

The assignment has three parts:

1. Mock Grant Proposal: review options, start thinking about what ideas you would write a proposal about. You don’t need to turn in anything.

2. Reading: Read one link and visit some grad student websites to see what they are like. You don’t need to turn in anything.

3. Writing: Create the beginning of a CV. You will turn this in on gradescope.

Details are below.

Mock Grant Proposal

You will prepare a mock grant proposal by the end of the semester. Please review the following two options and consider which you would prefer:

1. A mock application for an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSFGRFP).

   See:

   • https://www.nsfgrfp.org/resources/about_grfp
   • https://www.nsfgrfp.org/applicants/application_components

   By the end of the semester you will prepare and share

   • Graduate Research Plan Statement
   • Personal, Relevant Background and Future Goals Statement

2. A proposal for a grant from the Made-Up Agency. An MUA Grant offers up to $34,000 annually for 3 years, for math graduate students to support their education, research, and teaching.

   By the end of the semester you will prepare and share

   • A statement of your proposal, your goals in research (or teaching, or your education).
   • A budget. How you will use the funds (e.g., travel, computer equipment and supplies, books, etc).
   • A statement on your background.

Either way, the research plan can be creative, even whimsical. It is supposed to establish (1) what is the plan, in comprehensible terms (2) why the plan is significant and worthwhile (possibly in a whimsical sense, but still, some kind of case should be made).

The budget is not meant to be completely serious, down to the penny or anything like that. The point is just to (mock!) think about how you would spend $34,000 annually.

The statement on your background is intended to establish that you will be able to achieve the goals in the research plan. It should definitely focus on relevant aspects of your preparation in terms of mathematics (and/or teaching), as opposed to non-academic things.

Current assignment

For the mock grant proposal, your current assignment is:

1. Review the above two options, including visiting the NSFGRFP site.

2. Start thinking of ideas for what your proposal could be about.

You will start outlining ideas next week. For now, you don’t need to turn in anything.

Reading

1. Visit https://marktomforde.com/academic/gradstudents/gradstudents.html#Talks. Read any one of the articles under the “Giving Talks and Presenting Your Work” heading. Pull out three (3) concrete, specific, concise, brief pieces of advice. (Sentences, not paragraphs.) During our next meeting you’ll be asked to share 1-2 of them. (Prepare 3 in case other people say overlapping things.)

2. Visit at least 3 web pages of math grad students at schools other than Boise State. (For example, Utah, Oregon, UIUC.) Try to get a sense of what grad students include in their websites. Begin to consider what you might include in your website. You will start building a website in the next week or two.

   (If you already have a website then consider if there’s anything you’d like to update or add to it.)

You don’t need to turn in anything (but be prepared to share some of the presenting advice you read about).

Writing

Create the beginning of a CV. This is not even a first draft, just the beginning of writing a CV. It should include:

1. Your name and email address

2. Your degrees: the exact name of the degree and major, the school, and the year. You should include your Boise State M.S. in Mathematics, with your expected graduation year plus the word “(expected)”.

Use LaTeX to make it. At this point I don’t care at all about precise formatting (margins, fonts, spiffy divider lines, etc). Feel free to use one of the many CV packages (just google “latex cv”), or not, you absolutely don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Over the coming weeks we’ll build up the CV and add more content to it (e.g., writings and publications), and we’ll add some formatting. Right now the goal is just to create a file and get it started.

If you already have a CV, you can use it.

Upload your CV to gradescope.

I will not grade your CV for “correctness” or appearance. The reason to upload it to gradescope is for feedback.

My CV is linked at https://zteitler.github.io/cv/. You can copy it if you like, but you don’t have to.