The Mount Holyoke REU
I chose Mt. Holyoke's math REU, which was a really interesting program. I did enjoy it, although it was less organised than I would have liked it to be. It seemed like the two advisers involved with the program were not sure of what they wanted us to be doing. In addition, although they had said that we would have weekly seminars, to share our progress, we did only once. It would have been good to have more such seminars.

The thirteen of us were split into two groups, each of which worked with one advisor. My group spent about 5 of the 8 weeks on background, most of it quite interesting math, which I really enjoyed. However, this left us with only 3 weeks to develop a project, which ended up being too short to make satisfactory progress. (The other group started on their project almost right away, though, which meant that they learned less new math, but did make more progress.)

In addition, six or seven people were placed with each advisor. While the group atmosphere allowed us to discussion problems we were having together, I felt like I would have benefitted more from a one-on-one experience, especially since I come from a university with more distant faculty.

The people in the program were very interesting, and I enjoyed having a lot of people to talk about math with. Because Mt. Holyoke is so isolated (albeit quite pretty), we were pretty much forced into socializing a lot, which was a good experience, since we had such a diverse group of people.
--Janet Rosenbaum (jerosenb@hcs)