Overview: The combined Applied Mathematics, Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics graduate programs propose a range of enhancements and initiatives to our existing graduate recruitment program

with the following objectives:

• To successfully recruit the best applicants and accelerate their progress through our programs.
• To continue our marked success at building a diverse graduate student population.
• To increase the numbers of US students successfully recruited to our programs.
• To increase awareness of the scientific excellence of our faculty among undergraduate programs.

The principle guiding these initiatives is to increase our success in attracting candidates to our programs by leveraging our existing recruitment methods, excellent and active research groups and strong graduate community.

Our graduate programs have never lacked for good applicants. In recent years we have in fact become more selective in our admissions offering admission only to students we consider worthy of financial support (although we are not able to support all those we admit). There are however, three areas where our recruitment and admissions process is under pressure; we need to recruit students with strong English skills as we need a large number of TA's. We have a very strong reputation for attracting women and minorities but this is a highly competitive area and we must work to maintain our success. Finally, we remain only modestly successful in attracting the very best undergraduates to apply and persuading them to actually come. The initiatives and enhancements we propose are meant to help address these pressures. As background information we have included an appendix describing our graduate program.

Fellowship Enhancement:

Four Year Fellows: A significant factor in recruiting the very best candidates is the attractiveness of the fellowship package they are offered. Our University Fellowships are two year fellowships and in the current market this is simply not competitive for the best candidates. They can expect fellowship support for up to five years at places like Penn State or Rutgers who have NSF VIGRE support, and only limited teaching duties at schools like Princeton or Stanford. We propose to convert four University Fellowships each year into four year fellowships with the additional cost shared between this initiative and the department. As with University Fellowships, fellows will be offered a half-time TA-ship on top of the fellowship and will be expected to do some teaching during their tenure at Maryland.

Independent of whether this Initiative is funded, the department will begin funding two such enhanced Fellowships this year.

Prematriculation Summer Fellows: It is common for otherwise strongly recommended minority applicants to have poor preparation and to be provisionally admitted subject to completion of some advanced undergraduate courses. Starting this year the Department has funded a Prematriculation Summer Fellowship program to allow the most promising of these students to take summer classes before they enter our program to eliminate the provisions to their admission. We funded three such students. Two were spectacularly successful, obtaining very high marks. The third had difficulty, withdrawing mid term. We will continue this program and request funds to double its size.

Budget: The total annual cost of Fellowship including stipend of around $15,500, tuition remission and benefits is approximately $27,000 per Fellow. This total can be quite variable depending on the nature of the health package chosen by the Fellow. As both the Departmental and Initiative funds come from State sources, all the cost of tuition remission and benefits will come from the State pool and the actual cost to this Initiative and to the Department per Fellow should be $15,500. This number is the sum of an academic year stipend of $12,500 and a summer supplement of $3,000. The Prematriculation Summer Fellowships are for $3,000.

Annual cost to Initiative: $71,000 (just $40,000 the first year)

Annual cost to Department: $71,000

Annual cost to State Benefits pool: ~$100,000

Implementation and Evaluation: These programs have already been started by the Department. We will actively advertise the existence of these Fellowships to attract strong candidates For these Fellowships our goal is to attract students with the best credentials (strong undergraduate institution and record, exceptional GPA and test scores, outstanding letters) and train them to completion of their PhD in five years or less and to see them continue in their profession at the highest level. We expect most if not all of the Prematriculation Fellows to remove any provisions during the summer and to proceed through our program at normal pace. We expect this summer program to help maintain our success in recruiting and training a diverse student body.

Enhancing our successful visiting program: Our general practice to recruit attractive candidates has been to invite them to visit the department in order to introduce them personally to our programs, faculty and students. We are known for our open and supportive scholarly community and such visits allow us to showcase this strength. This can be particularly critical for minority and female applicants who often approach graduate school with real concern as to whether they will feel comfortable in a department. We request funds to match our usual departmental budget for this so that we can arrange such visits without budgetary hesitation. We would focus our efforts on applicants already in North America both for reasons of expense and our need to recruit applicants with good English skills.

Cost to Initiative: $5,000

Cost to Department: at least $5,000

Implementation and Evaluation: A reasonable measure of which students we find particularly attractive is whether or not we offer them financial aid. Each year we offer financial aid to between 90 and 100 applicants. Of these about three fifths are from North America. We would intend to actively invite every applicant in North America (US, Canada and Mexico) to visit campus for up to two days, offering to support their travel expenses and to pay their local motel expenses. We would only consider such visits from Europe, South America or Asia if they were especially attractive and the effort seemed needed. We estimate that perhaps two thirds of those invited will come and that on average each will cost $300 leading to a budget total of around $15,000. Fifty visiting applicants will be perhaps a doubling of what we currently see. It will be necessary to organize our faculty and graduate students to welcome and orient these visitors and for the Graduate Office to commit more time toward arranging these visits. We would expect to see this substantial increase in the number of visiting applicants and a measurable increase in the number of acceptances from students in the US, Mexico and Canada. We note that our need for teaching assistants is finite. We currently fill our needs. Hence we will strengthen our standards as we make assistantship offers in response to this potential increase in success.

Broadening and Strengthening our Contacts: The previous initiatives have been directed toward students actively applying to our programs, graduating seniors or transferring masters students. To reach students who have not yet applied we propose to run an annual Weekend Recruiting Conference. Central to this conference would be a series of introductory lectures describing our strong research areas (Nonlinear Dynamics, Scientific Computation, Medical Imaging/Wavelets, Geometry, Representation Theory, Number Theory/Cryptography). Advanced graduate students would present their thesis work. A general orientation to the graduate programs at Maryland and to professional opportunities in the mathematical sciences would be given. Our Women In Mathematics group and graduate student organization would be asked to chair discussions on both graduate mathematical education and the mathematical professions. Social events would round out the activities of the conference, luncheons, dinners and perhaps a field trip. We would target our advertising of this recruitment conference toward institutions that might provide us with high level students (like Princeton, MIT, Harvard), schools from which we have traditionally attracted good students (Virginia Tech, Case Western Reserve, UVA, UMBC), and the Historically Black institutions with which we have built good contacts (Spelman, Howard, Morehouse, etc.).

This conference would be open to advanced undergraduates (junior/senior level) who intend to continue to graduate school in the mathematical sciences. We would actively support participation by groups from the same school and would be very flexible in whose participation we would support. Funding is requested for the preparation of advertising materials and to offer nominal travel support and housing for up to 50 participants.

Our graduate students often return to visit their undergraduate institutions and such visits provide an opportunity for us to advertise our programs, especially those in South America, Europe or Asia not reachable by our Recruiting Conference. We request the flexibility to use part of this budget to partially support the travel of such students.

Cost to Initiative: $10,000

Cost to the Department: at least $5,000

Implementation and Evaluation: The Department has long experience and good facilities for conferences. To support this initiative and those that follow the Department will assign a graduate assistant as an aid to the Graduate Office at a total added expense of $27,500 (only $15,500 actually from the department's budget). This is not included in the above cost to the Department. This conference would be held on a weekend in October, a particularly nice time to visit Maryland and early enough for students to get in their applications for the following Fall. Our goal is to see participation by good numbers of students from the kinds of institutions named above and to see a substantial increase in applications from those schools as a result.

We would use no more than $2,000 of this budget for students traveling to their UG institutions, offering to supplement travel by up to $300 and would expect a brief report on recruiting efforts.

Raising Awareness: The primary goals of the two initiatives we discuss here are educational and outreach to our local community of Colleges and Universities and beyond. As a secondary benefit though they will raise awareness of our strong graduate programs and excellent research groups among undergraduate mathematics majors. The strongest applicants to our programs have quite often completed a senior thesis, participated in an NSF sponsored REU, or worked in a research environment professionally. They may have already earned a masters and even have authored or co-authored research articles. Such applicants apply to Maryland with very clear goals in mind and are usually attracted by particular research groups or individual faculty. We must reach out to this pool of applicants raising the general awareness of the strength of the science being done in our programs.

Undergraduate Parallel Sessions: Each year several research conferences are sponsored by the department. Our location and our strong and highly regarded research groups make these popular and well attended. We propose that parallel to each of these we run an Undergraduate session. Principal speakers at the main conference would also be asked to speak to this session at a level understandable to an advanced undergraduate. Advanced graduate students would be invited to present their thesis work at a level understandable to an advanced undergraduate. Local faculty would organize background seminars to provide visiting undergraduates with a more complete understanding of the research area. These parallel sessions would be advertised and funding is requested to support nominal travel expenses and housing for students that participate.

Cost to Initiative: $5,000

Cost to Department: $5,000

Implementation and Evaluation: We plan for up to three conference parallel sessions per year ($3,000—5,000 per conference) to support up to 20 students per conference for housing and travel. For example, next year the Department will host the Geometry Festival and every spring it hosts the joint Maryland--Penn State Dynamics Conference. Both of these would host parallel sessions. Our goal would be to see participation by students with strong credentials and the formation of contacts between those participants and our faculty and graduate students leading to their applying to and entering our programs.

Undergraduate Lecture Service: We propose to create a lecture service for undergraduate mathematics and statistics programs, clubs and organizations, comprised of our best research faculty who would present seminar type talks on up-to-date research at a level accessible to advanced undergraduates. Materials will be created to advertise this program. Initially we would direct this program toward colleges and universities within Maryland but we envision it growing to include the entire mid-Atlantic area. Funding is requested to cover the cost of travel and other expenses of the speakers

Cost to initiative: $5,000

Income from visited schools: $5,000

Implementation and Evaluation: We plan to have a set of ten lectures in our areas of strength well designed for an advanced undergraduate audience and we would like to see each presented three to five times during the year. We would encourage schools to create series based on our lecturers. We would expect the visited schools to pay the cost of the lecture (travel and housing) but would offer financial aid upon request. We expect to pay around half the cost on average. A number of faculty have already volunteered to participate as speakers (T.Y. Lee, Richard Schwarz, Denny Gulick, Dan Rudolph, Stu Antman, Ben Kedem) and we expect quite a number more. By the end of spring term we would expect to have abstracts and other materials from all our speakers and to use the summer to prepare our advertising materials.

a) Number of full-time graduate students in each of the previous 5 years.

This table gives the number of full-time PhD seeking students in the graduate program each of the previous five academic years. 1994-95 145

1995-96 138

1996-97 139

1997-98 136

1998-99 129

b) Number of applicants each of the previous five years:

FY 94-95 FY 95-96 FY 96-97 FY 97-98 FY 98-99

Applications 313 250 264 260 280

received

Offers of 162 162 113 93 160

Admission

Acceptances 36 42 32 35 50

c) Numbers of PhD's granted in each of the previous five years

Each total includes PhD's awarded in August, May or December of the fiscal year.

FY 94-95 18

FY 95-96 19

FY 96-97 17

FY 97-98 28

FY 98-99 24

d) Numbers of teaching assistants supported by the Department each of the previous five years

Fall 95 106

Fall 96 99

Fall 97 95

Fall 98 96

Fall 99 104

e) University non-teaching support for graduate students in each of the previous 5 years. The following include Recruiting Fellowships, Student Support Grants for minority student (since discontinued), Dissertation Fellowships, and Summer Supplements. Each dollar amount is the fellowship support paid in the given academic year, September through August.

Year Dollar Amount

1994-95 $160K

1995-96 $180K

1996-97 $154K

1997-98 $137K

1998-99 $131K

f) Support by Federal Agencies for graduate students in each of the previous five years.

The following table includes student support from NSF and other federal grants.

Year Amount

1993-94 $64,850

1994-95 $82,976

1995-96 $121,300

1996-97 $144,284

1997-98 $93,404

Diversity: Our programs have a real and effective commitment to the recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented groups to higher education and advanced careers. Members of our administration and faculty have worked hard to find strong candidates for our programs from these groups, to bring them to Maryland and once here to nurture them through our programs. We have been successful in recruiting and graduating women in recent years. Currently women comprise about 1/4 of the Phd seeking students in MATH, half of STAT and 2/5 of MAPL. In the combined programs 30 of the 98 PhD's in the past five years were women, 10 of the 19 last year. In our three programs we currently have 21 African American students, and 7 Hispanics. This is a dramatic change brought about in the last six years by the concerted effort of the University and our faculty. The community of African American students is making good progress to degree (one Ph.D. in '96, one in '98, two have advanced to candidacy, three others have passed the qualifying exams, and five more have passed two of the three exams).

Around 65% of our current student population in the three programs consist of US citizens and permanent residents. This population is quite important to us as they make the transition to our program more easily and do not present the extra language and cultural problems we often face with foreign students. It has been noted nationally that the numbers of US citizens and permanent residents applying to graduate programs in mathematics has declined dramatically in the past ten years. We have not suffered dramatically from this decline as both the breadth and quality of our programs has continued to be attractive. We appear to be noting an end to this decline as mathematics again is becoming a more attractive field of study. We do find ourselves, however, in strong competition with other schools for top students. Until now our only source of fellowship funds is University fellowships and they are not as competitive as those other schools can offer. In particular they do not include health insurance. The department regularly offers 1/2 TA-ships and supplementary money on top of University Fellowships to create more attractive offers to the very best applicants.

The recent VIGRE initiative of the National Science Foundation has brought this issue particularly to the fore, giving those who have received them substantial funds for the particular purpose of recruiting US citizens to graduate school. We have lost outstanding applicants to these schools. We have now applied twice for VIGRE funding and failed both times. We will apply again once another initiative is announced. The University offered TA's a raise this past year and the Department was able, with the improved financial climate, to further enhance this. For incoming students this meant a raise from a ten month salary of $10,500 to $11,650. Of the forty top school in the NRC rankings (with Maryland at the midpoint) we ranked 39th in TA salary before this raise. Not knowing what other schools have done we cannot tell where we now lie precisely, but we now are near the middle of the pack. This is a dramatic improvement and it should dramatically improve our recruiting efforts next spring.