“How about beginners?” one may ask. “How can they engage in consulting if they don’t yet know anything relevant? Take statistics, for example – a student needs to know a lot of statistics to start consulting. They should be graduate students, or seniors at least.”
There are two assumptions in this objection:
- Students without a strong technical background do not know enough to begin consulting work.
- Clients only ask questions that require a strong technical background.
We have found that neither of these assumptions is universally true: there are, in fact, numerous scenarios and occasions in which beginners and relative beginners can contribute very positively to resolving, or helping to resolve, a client’s requirements.
Mentoring research beginners
The Department of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has extensive experience in mentoring undergraduates, of all ability and experience levels, in undergraduate research. Some examples of students who carried out, or began, research as freshman and sophomores are:
- Leanne Silvia, Laplacian Energy of Graphs (Freshman)
- Kerenne Paul, Fourier Series/ Gibbs Phenomenon (Freshman)
- Christine DiStefano, Matrix Energy (Sophomore)
- Zachary Grant, Fourier Series (Freshman/Sophomore)
- Tania Oliveira, An Analysis of Radial Basis Functions and Application in 2D Edge Detection (Freshman/Sophomore)
- Peter Jumper, A stable method for analyzing the Jeans condition (Freshman/Sophomore)
- Kevin Jumper, Modeling the deflagration phase of a single-degenerate type Ia supernova (Freshman/Sophomore)
- Logan Thomas, Numerical investigation of accuracy of certain quantum mechanical approximate propagators (Freshman)
- Justin McKennon, Comparative Exploration of CUDA and OpenCL for Gravitational Wave Source Modeling (Sophomore)
Research mentoring: faculty and students
Beginners & consulting
While consulting for a client is not exactly the same as undertaking and independent research study, there are some significant similarities – particularly in the areas of statistics, data analysis, and mathematical modeling.
A example of a beginning undergraduate student’s efforts at consulting for a scientific client, is:
- Salvador Balkus, Exploratory Data Analysis for Waquoit Bay Dune Data (Sophomore)