Applied Mathematics News

Applied Math senior, Lindsey Weishaar, is completing her Capstone internship at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield in the Market Research Department. At her internship, Lindsey programs surveys and analyzes data from the results of the surveys. This internship is giving Lindsey real world experience towards her career goal of working for the federal government!

Ray Salas, Financial Advisor at Northwestern Mutual, visited SU to discuss internships for our Applied Math students. Ray was a Capstone mentor for Michael Byrd (Applied Math ’17) and we look forward to other students working with Ray to get real-life experience in this exciting field. Ray (left) is shown here with Ellen Roskes (next to Ray), department chair, Ben Wilson, faculty member, and Michelle Schwartz, Student Engagement Coordinator.

Applied Math Senior, Courtney Hohn, is completing her Capstone Internship at the Social Security Administration in the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. Her role as an intern is to identify any errors and redundancy in the 2016 SSI Annual Statistical Report, create visualizations of monthly data for publication on SSA’s website, and use her programming skills to create interactive maps of data. Courtney hopes to one day become a high school math teacher, but she likes having the experience of working as a mathematician in the government.

Congratulations to Dr. Kerry Spencer who was awarded an SU Seed Grant based on her research on Young Adult literature. Here is how she describes her project:

My work considers the way book marketing functions both independently and dependently from book content in the US Young Adult (YA) market. Marketing for YA literature is particularly complicated because the parties buying books are not usually the same as the ones reading them. By mathematically/inductively establishing the effect of YA book marketing on book sales, the effect of book content on sales can be analyzed; such analysis typically uncovers demographic-related implicit bias with works by POC and women disproportionately affected by lower levels of marketing.