I spent the summer of 1994 at an REU at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. I was one of eleven students at the program. My group (five students) was working on a computational group theory project; the other six students were studying algebraic geometry. The two groups worked in adjoining rooms and met on Thursdays to talk about what each of us had done.

It's very important who your advisor is. Our advisor, Professor Harriet Pollatsek, was great. She was always available to give (often much-needed) advice but never hovered. She was also able to coordinate the work of the five of us, not an easy task since our levels of preparation varied greatly. Our project involved a lot of representation theory, which two of us (including myself) had seen and three hadn't, and Harriet was very good at keeping the two of us interested without making the other students feel inferior. (Apparently there was the same sort of imbalance in the other group, which led to some tensions because their advisor wasn't able to deal with it as well.) She also encouraged us to pursue tangential topics; I even wrote an independent paper (which is probably the most boring thing that Tangents has ever published) which stemmed entirely from a ring-theory calculation we needed to perform.

The schedule was extremely relaxed. Officially we worked 9 to 5, but we could pretty much come and go as we pleased. I found myself sleeping late and leaving early, but also going into the lab on weekends to see what the computers had been doing.

One big drawback is that Mount Holyoke is in the middle of nowhere. The campus is beautiful, with lakes, trees and hiking paths galore (just avoid the mosquito-infested swamp that I stumbled into once), but the town of South Hadley has a population of maybe 1000 in the summer, and there's just nothing there. On the bright side, Amherst and Northampton are nearby college towns with somewhat more to do. Boston is 2+ hours away. Having a car is a big plus; I didn't but someone else did (believe it or not, he had driven to Mount Holyoke from his home state of Alaska.) We managed to get away to Cape Cod (3+ hours of driving each way) over the 4th of July weekend.

The living arrangements... well, they gave us nice big singles, but there was no board plan, so we had to cook our own meals. Try sharing a tiny dorm kitchen with the other 30 or so summer students living in the same building (two of whom would cook elaborate meals and monopolize the stove) and you'll know the true meaning of frustration. Of course, there are obvious advantages to cooking for yourself.

One nice thing is that the pay is somewhat better than most REUs -- it worked out to about $2800 for eight weeks.

--Jeremy Martin '96 (jeremy@math)