October 2006 Newsletter
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Hi, All,

The Mathematics Undergraduate Advising office is launching a monthly newsletter. I will email it to all Math majors early each month from October through June. We will soon be archiving each issue on the Math web site, as well; so, while I recommend you keep this issue, before long you can read the newsletter, delete it, then look up whatever is most interesting to you at www.math.ucsc.edu.

In this issue:
- Looming Deadlines (Including Career Center events)
- Fall Undergraduate Colloquia
- Course Profile: Math 114, Mathematical Principals of Modern Finance, Winter 2007
- Career Profile: Psychometrics
- Applying to Graduate School

Looming Deadlines

- Putnam Mathematical Competition Registration - October 10
Visit http://math.scu.edu/putnam
Interested students contact Professor Bruce Cooperstein. Phone: 459-2150.
Email: coop@ucsc.edu. Office: Baskin 357A MWF 11-12 & 3:30-4:30 or by appointment.
- Hispanic Scholarship Fund Application Deadline - October 16
Visit http://www.hsf.net/scholarship/programs/Pfizer.php.
- UCDC Spring Internship Application Deadline - October 19 before 4:00pm
Visit http://zzyx.ucsc.edu/Pol/ucdc/. Or pick up an application at Merrill College Academic Building Room 5 or outside Room 27.
- UC Center In Sacramento (UCCS) Winter Internship Application Deadline - October 20 
Visit http://intern.ucsc.edu/uccs.html.
- UCSC Education Dept. PhD. Student Info Night - October 23 6:30PM-8:30PM @ The University Center
Must RSVP by email to edfs@ucsc.edu by October 17.
- Crown Undergraduate Research Application Deadline - October 27
Visit http://www2.ucsc.edu/crown/academics/fellowships.php.
- Cal Teach Winter Internships Application Deadline - mid-November
Visit http://calteach.ucsc.edu/info.html.
- Goldwater Scholarship nomination packet due PB Sci. Dean's Office - January 8
Scholarships up to $7,500.
For nomination packets visit http://www.act.org/goldwater. The nomination packets are quite extensive. Start the process for completing the application at least one month prior to the due date.

Career Center Events http://www2.ucsc.edu/careers/

- Mock Interviews with Employers - October 10
- Business, Science, Finance and Engineering Career Symposium
- Employer Panel - October 10
- Networking Fair - October 17
Meet with companies specifically looking for math majors for internships, summer         positions and full and part-time jobs: Evans Data Cooperation, Efficient Frontier, and  First Investors Co.
- Graduate & Professional School Fair - October 23
- Graduate & Professional School Information - October 24
FREE Practice GRE Test - October 28th 2:00-4:10pm Classroom Unit 1
Register online @ http://kaptest.com/testdrive.

Upcoming Colloquia  http://natsci2.ucsc.edu/semedit/flyer.seminar.html?x=310

Wednesday, October 11
Dr. Frank Bäuerle, Lecturer UCSC Mathematics Department
Games Night: "SET"
SET is a card game that uses modular (or clock) arithmetic and geometry.

Wednesday October 18
Professor Tony Tromba, UCSC Mathematics Department
"The History of Number and Numeration"
We will trace the long struggle to find an adequate system of counting. Why was it so hard?

Tuesday October 24, noon **Note special day and time**
Professor Robion Kirby, UC Berkeley
"The Projective Plane, Boy's Surface, and Everting the 2-Sphere"
Professor Kirby is going to discuss the projective plane, give a nice description of Boy's surface and show how a 2-sphere can be turned inside out through immersions.

Wednesday, November 1
Dr. Frank Bäuerle, Lecturer UCSC Mathematics Department
Games Night: "Hex"
Hex is an abstract strategy game that belongs to the general category of "connection" games.

Class Profile: Math 114 - Introduction to Financial Mathematics
Instructor: Toufic Suidan

Over the last decade, financial institutions, corporations, brokerage and investment houses, stock, bond commodity, and hedge funds have relied increasingly on mathematical strategies as an asset management tool. Mathematics 114 is an introduction to some of the mathematical technologies in this field. It will illuminate the career possibilities in finance that a mathematical background could lead to.

Introduction to Financial Mathematics is an upper division course offered in the Winter quarter. It examines financial derivatives, contracts and options, hedging and risk management, arbitrage, interest rate, and discounted value; geometric random walk and Brownian motion as models of risky assets; Ito's formula, initial boundary value problems for the heat and related partial differential equations, self-financing replicating portfolio, Black-Scholes pricing of European options, dividends, implied volatility, and American options as free boundary problems. The prerequisite for this class is either course 24 or Applied Mathematics & Statistics 27. The corequisite is either course 112, Applied Mathematics & Statistics 131, or Computer Engineering 107.

Career Profile: Psychometrician

Sz-Shyan Wu is not a Cuban baseball star or a dissident musician. But in urging the United States government to grant him a work visa, the New York State Education
Department is arguing that Mr. Wu, too, has talents so rare that bureaucracy must be cut and a red carpet rolled out. Mr. Wu is a psychometrician or, in plain English, an expert on testing. And testing experts are in high demand. With federal law requiring wider testing of students, the nation faces a critical shortage of people with the mathematical, scientific, psychological, and educational skills to create tests and analyze results.

The problem has sent testing companies and school districts into a heated hiring competition, with companies offering salaries as high as $200,000 or more. Even with the ability to offer bonuses and other perks, the major test publishers nearly all have openings. Experts are needed in every aspect of developing, administering and scoring exams, from deciding what test will best measure certain skills to drawing up questions and answer sheets. They also have to wrestle with questions about how to measure learning as well as creating and analyzing tests. This has always been a small group of professionals but, since the No Child Left Behind Act, the need for psychometricians has exploded. Job opportunities exist all around the country. The large test publisher, CTB/McGraw-Hill, has offices right over in Monterey.

A recent trend in the past few years for creating standardized tests is the increased use of sophisticated, mathematically based models in creating and scoring tests. Psychometricians use mathematical techniques to evaluate the large sets of data from these tests. Techniques that include factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and data clustering are used everyday.

Graduate programs in psychometrics go by many names. While some schools, for example the University of Nebraska and the University of Colorado, offer a Master's Program in Educational Psychology with emphasis in Psychometrics, other schools, such as the University of Iowa, offer an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Educational Measurement and Statistics. Doctoral programs are producing at most, 50 graduates a year in the field.
A student who expects to concentrate in this area must have extensive training and experience in college mathematics, as well as a familiarity with psychology. As test-taking continues to grow, especially standardized testing, so does the need for test-makers. "It's a good day to be a psychometrician," Gary Cook, an education researcher at the University of Wisconsin, said. "There's a limited set of people who are qualified for the job." 
For more information on careers and graduate programs in psychometrics visit:
http://www.math.ucsc.edu/undergraduate/careers/statistics.html
http://www.ncme.org/careers/program_descriptions.pdf

Applying to Graduate School?

Juniors: Seek advising from the Mathematics Department on your course choices. Start looking for REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and other research opportunities for next summer. Register and prepare for the Subject GRE offered in April. http://www.ets.org/gre/.

Seniors: If you have not already requested applications and information from schools you are interested in, do so right away. List writers for letters of recommendation. Find out which GREs schools require you to take (the General Test, a Subject Test, or both). General Tests are offered year-round, while Subject Tests are offered 3 times a year. Deadline for registration for the Dec 2 Subject Test is Oct 27. Deadline for registration for the Feb 10 General Test is Jan 5. Note that scores for the December test will be mailed out first week of January and February test will be mailed out in mid-March. 

- October - Write statement of purpose.
- November - Ask letter writers to begin letters. Subject GRE offered. http://www.ets.org/gre/.
- December - Subject GRE offered. http://www.ets.org/gre/.

Applications are due January-March, depending on the school. The Subject GRE is offered again in April.

--
Naomi Brokaw, Undergraduate Advisor
UCSC Mathematics Office, 194 Baskin
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Phone: 831-459-4691 Fax: 831-459-3260

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