Advertisement. Ohio State's graduate program brochure, containing a brief description of the graduate program, contact information, and the anticipated nine month TA stipend, is distributed nationally and internationally to a large number of colleges and universities. We also advertise our graduate program on the departmental webpage.
Faculty Contacts. The Vice Chair for Graduate Studies maintains contacts with corresponding faculty at other institutions around the country regarding stipend levels, interest among their students in pursuing graduate work, etc., and provides such information in return. Faculty are encouraged to solicit applications from students of their colleagues in other departments of mathematics. The Vice Chair, occasionally accompanied by another faculty member or advanced graduate student, regularly visits colleges and universities throughout the state to recruit students. Students to whom we have made offers are invited to visit campus. After these visits, the Vice Chair, members of the Graduate Recruitment Committee, and selected faculty make follow-up contacts by telephone or email to encourage those students to study at Ohio State.
Visitation Days. During Winter Quarter, the Department organizes one or more Visitation Days which bring to campus student to whom we have made offers. Students arrive Friday and leave Sunday. On Friday the students walk through campus and department facilities, visit a graduate course, and meet with faculty and students over refreshments. Friday evening there is a reception at the Chair's home. Saturday afternoon, students are shown around Columbus by a number of graduate student volunteers who also take them out in the evening to sample the nightlife. We find this even split of formal interactions with faculty and informal interactions with current Ohio State students to be an effective recruitment device. In arranging Visitations Days, care is taken to involve a mix of faculty that includes women, researchers from different areas, and faculty originating both from the United States and abroad.
Recruitment of Traditionally Underrepresented Groups. The Graduate Program Student Visitation Day, organized with the help of the Ohio State University Office of Minority Affairs, is an annual program which identifies minority students interested in graduate work in mathematics and brings them to the Department to visit with faculty and students. To increase our minority recruiting effort we will initiate contacts with minority professional organizations around the nation and historically black colleges within the state. We hope to build upon these contacts to the point that they develop into relationships with Ohio State that bring greater numbers of minority students to our graduate program.
Two of the five hires made at Ohio State in the last two years were women. We hope and expect that greater numbers of women graduate students will be recruited to Ohio State, and be retained in greater numbers, as a consequence of the presence of excellent women mathematicians on the faculty.
Competitiveness. Ohio State offers each student accepted to the program a fellowship in the summer prior to their first year of graduate studies. This allows students to settle into Columbus, take the teacher preparation course and problem solving courses, make new acquaintances, and get oriented to graduate student life before Autumn Quarter begins. We offer competitive TA stipends, good computer support, and high quality physical space for graduate student offices.
Advising and Mentoring. The Vice Chair for Graduate Studies and the Graduate Advising Committee provide mentoring and advice to all graduate students. To help new students become acquainted with faculty research interests, the Department compiles and distributes a faculty survey handbook. The handbook gives detailed information about each faculty's current research, current advisees, availability to take on new students, and recommended course work to prepare for research in his or her area. Each year every graduate student participates in a thorough and thoughtful assessment of his or her progress.
Ongoing Improvements to the Graduate Program. Over the last several years, the Department has introduced several new courses including a sequence in financial mathematics (Boris Mityagin), a sequence in mathematical modelling (Ed Overman) and a course in cryptology (Alice Silverberg). Other recent improvements and recommendations have been described in section 2.2.
We believe that the principal components of this VIGRE proposal, especially the Invitation to Research and Working Group Rotations, will be very helpful in the recruitment and retention of graduate students.
We advertise nationally and internationally for Zassenhaus and Ross Assistant Professor positions. Faculty also take an active role in bringing promising candidates to the attention of the Advisory Committee, the committee which makes hiring recommendations to the Chair. The internal process by which hiring recommendations are made assures that each candidate has one or more supporters among the faculty. In the past, this has been very helpful in recruitment as well as retention. As is the case with graduate students, we believe that the primary components of the VIGRE proposal, especially the Invitation to Research and Working Group Rotations, will be very helpful in recruitment and retention of strong postdoctoral fellows.
We will recruit VIGRE undergraduates among our math majors, especially among honors students, and through the network of counselors of the Ross Summer Mathematics Program. The Radical Pi undergraduate math club will play an important role in advertising opportunities for undergraduate research experiences for students at Ohio State. The network of alumni of the Ross Program will be another source of undergraduate trainees. VIGRE opportunities will be advertised on the Department and Ross Program web pages.