Veronica Ciocanel

Starting in 2017, I founded a local Mathematical Contest for Modeling for undergraduate students at OSU. This contest has offered students from various departments the opportunity to apply their applied mathematics and computational skills to a real-world inspired problem. Students get to work in teams of three and write a report detailing their model and recommendations for the problem. We have had 17 teams participate last year, and we hope this will continue for the local contest this year. For the top-ranking teams, we have secured funding from the Mathematics department so that they get to participate in the (online) international version of the contest. Three OSU teams were awarded honorable mentions at this contest last year. Students reported enjoying the teamwork and intensive research experience, and many sought research opportunities after involvement in this contest. Graduate students, postdocs, and faculty at OSU are also involved in the local contest through creating problems and judging reports.