The creation of an IMMERSE-style course

Ellen Veomett

Ellen Veomett

In the October 2012 issue of Notices of the AMS, Ellen Veomett, a 2002 UNL mathematics graduate from Lincoln, describes how she took her experience teaching a summer IMMERSE course and adapted it into a "regular" course at her own institution.

Veomett, an assistant professor of mathematics at St. Mary's College in California, was an IMMERSE early-career faculty member in the summer of 2010, while she was teaching at Cal State University East Bay in Hayward, Calif.

IMMERSE, part of the $2.5 million Mentoring through Critical Transition Points (MCTP) grant from the National Science Foundation, is a six-week program for 20 "pre-grads" who will begin graduate school in the fall at various universitites. They are mentored by two early-career faculty while the early-career faculty are in turn mentored by UNL professors.

In her article "An IMMERSE-Style Course Brings a Research Experience to Students and Faculty," Veomett's IMMERSE-style course helps students see how various types of mathematics interact in research, while also accomplishing two important goals: encouraging undergraduate students in research projects and bridging the gap between an undergraduate and graduate degree.

Veomett gives her recommendations in the article on how to choose a research paper for students to read, how to organize the lecture stage of the course before the students read the research paper, and how to set up the reading stage of the course when students read and discuss the paper in groups and present sections of the paper.

She also stresses the aid of the resources she had available to her at UNL during IMMERSE, thanking Professor Jamie Radcliffe for his mentorship and graduate students Joe Geisbauer, Lauren Keough and Zahava Wilstein for their assistance with the pre-grads.

The complete AMS article, is available online here. Veomett also has posted her course resources here.

-Lindsay Augustyn