In a shift back to personal math stories after the recent columns on national and global (tangentially) math-related events, I attended my first conference a couple weekends ago. In fact, the conference itself was a first: it was the premiere meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ New York–New Jersey–Pennsylvania (SIAM-NNP) Section, hosted nearby at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The conference featured students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty members, and industry professionals mainly from the three states in the name of the section, and some from even farther regions of the United States. Stevens itself was well-featured at the event — I first want to give shoutouts to fellow PhD student Shima Jalalian, as well as Professors Ramos and Bozdog, for presenting talks throughout the weekend.
The event was structured to have several “minisymposia” which featured four to five 20 minute research presentations (or “talks”) in a specific subfield of mathematics research. Many of you may be surprised to learn that a conference attendee could choose from 20 or so subfields, ranging from machine learning to high-performance computing, from mathematical physics to mathematical biology, and from more theoretical math to math tailored for large-scale industrial applications. I think the only downside to the conference was that the talks were run in parallel by subfield, so as much as I would’ve liked, I couldn’t attend all of them!
The ones I did attend were in subfields most related to my research in computational methods for partial differential equations (an aside: at some point soon, I plan to write an article describing this research more!). There was a lot to learn in these talks, and it was really nice getting to listen to people present their work. I also attended a few talks by presenters I knew previously or whom I’d met during the conference, to catch up and share new ideas. I tried to ask a question after every talk I listened to, and I appreciate the presenters for always giving a great answer — those researchers really know their stuff!
In between the talks were coffee breaks and lunches, where I got to socialize a bit more and have some fun not-necessarily-math-related conversations with other attendees. I knew generally how the conference was structured before the weekend, but I was filled with joy in the moments of actually attending and connecting with fellow researchers and math enthusiasts.
My major takeaway from this event is that academia really got it right when coming up with conferences. They are a wonderful way to bring a large group of people with common interests and a lot of novel ideas together, and provide loads of excitement and new lines of research and collaboration for the attendees. Of course, it takes a lot of work organizing such events, so a big shoutout to the organizing committee of this event as well (you can find all their names on the SIAM-NNP website link above).
For me, I’m looking forward to attending hopefully many more conferences in the future, and preparing presentations for them. I should also note that these conferences generally provide funding for travel or lodging for the attendees who are traveling longer distances to make the event — I hope that in the future, conferences continue to be able to provide funding to those long-distance trekkers, as well as researchers from underrepresented groups whose ideas are making more and more inroads into academic circles.
And lastly, I look forward to seeing Stevens host more conferences in the future. Just this past weekend, HASS hosted a Thoughts on Bots conference, and in a week from today, the LeadHERShip Conference, which has an outstanding group of keynote speakers and a series of workshops that will no doubt inspire and motivate conference attendees, will take place. For both undergraduates and graduates, I hope you all get the chance to attend a conference at least once in your career, and I encourage you to make the most of it by talking as much as you can with new people, and being unafraid to share your ideas and perspectives.
