Academic Summer Highlights - What Are Yours?

Next Tuesday is the first day of classes of the new 2016-2017 academic year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and students have started to arrive back to campus and the town.

It was a terrific summer and I thought it would be fun to share some of the highlights.

In late April, after teaching my last classes at the Isenberg School of Management, I flew to England to begin my Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford University. The experience of being at Oxford for two and a half months (during the trinity term) was magical and many times I felt as though I was living in a novel. Below is a photo of the Visiting Fellows, who hailed from Israel, Australia, England, and the US, along with our Dean, Dr. Simon Hornblower.

While at Oxford, my new book, Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective, was published, and when I returned to Amherst, I celebrated with my co-author, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li.

I also had the pleasure of making a very short (4 day) trip back to the US in late May to see my daughter, Alexandra, graduate summa cum laude and with honors from college. I am especially happy that she was a STEM major and had an incredible educational experience at Lafayette College, which is also her father's alma mater, serving as President of the crew team, to start.

Back at Oxford my husband and daughter joined me for a while and we visited one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Stavros Siokos, who is a very successful financier in London.

While in England, it  was also very special to give invited seminars at Imperial College in London and at Lancaster University. Our operations research colleagues tend to be the best hosts!

While in Europe, I also had the pleasure of traveling to Poznan, Poland to speak at the EURO conference, which was fabulous and I got to see former students and many colleagues from around the world.

One "lowlight" as opposed to highlight of this summer was waking up in Oxford the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union - known as Brexit. Everyone was walking around Oxford as in a daze and we were so upset that we penned an OpEd, Why we are stronger together,  that appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Coming back from Europe I was delighted to see that the STEM Gems book, authored by Stephanie Espy, on 44 women role models in STEM (and I am one of the women featured), had been published and my copies had arrived. My daughter and nieces are the happy recipients of some of the copies and I also gave one to the Isenberg Dean Dr. Mark A. Fuller and to deserving doctoral students for inspiration!

In late August, it was time to drive my daughter to grad school, where she will be working on her PhD.

Then it was time to celebrate with my academic daughters. My doctoral student, Deniz Besik, successfully passed her core exam in Management Science at the Isenberg School on April 5,

and Sara Saberi became my 19th PhD student to successfully defend her PhD, which she did on August 12. She is now an Assistant Professor at the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

And, of course, no academic summer would be complete without getting some research papers written and, hopefully, accepted for publication! Two highlights were having the paper, Physical Proof of the Occurrence of the Braess Paradox in Electrical Circuits,  Ladimer S. Nagurney and Anna Nagurney,  published in  EPL (Europhysics Letters) 115 (2016) 28004, and having the paper,  A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, Anna Nagurney, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Ceren Soylu, accepted for publication in Transportation Research E. UMass Amherst posted a nice article on our latest Braess Paradox paper.

Working with other members of our great Supernetwork Team this summer has also been a big pleasure!

This summer the Olympics also took place in Rio and I would be remiss not to mention that one of the highlights was watching Michael Hixon, who is a student at Indiana University, and who also grew up in our neighborhood in Amherst (his parents live up the street from us),  receive a silver medal in diving,  I watched the competitions that he was in via videostream and I was mesmerized and as nervous as when my daughter competed in figure skating.

And, as educators, this is always an exciting time of the year during which we anticipate what will the new academic year bring?!  I have been working on my course lectures and am looking forward to meeting new students and new colleagues.

As for this summer, it will be hard to have a better one, but who knows what kind of adventures await next year!

Milestones Towards Your PhD

Congratulations! You have received admission into a doctoral program and will be supported by a fellowship or perhaps you will be working as a Teaching Assistant (TA) or a Research Assistant (RA). For the latter you might be supported by a professor's research grant.

Many graduate students are now starting to move to their new homes which will be the universities at which they will be pursuing their PhDs. Some travel hundreds of miles and some cross oceans and continents in pursuit of their dreams.

Graduate school is quite different from being an undergraduate and now you are officially an adult. You have identified a subject which is your passion and that you want to do research in. This, in itself is an achievement.

You will soon be registering for courses, undergoing orientation, and maybe even meeting your advisor for the very first time in person. Some universities bring prospective doctoral students to campus for interviews, but not all do.

The first year of graduate school is always exciting, since, unless you stay on at your undergraduate alma mater (as I did and amassed 4 degrees from Brown University), everything will be quite new to you.  There will be a new campus to explore, new friends to make, and new exciting courses to take, with a greater focus than in your undergraduate studies.

Following your first year of graduate study there will, most likely, be Milestone 1 and that is the Core Exam. Today, for example, one of my doctoral students had the oral component of her core exam, which was based on a paper that she had written over the summer, which she defended in front of her committee. Some programs and schools have one or two day written exams only and in our Management Science doctoral program at the Isenberg School we used to have such a core exam.  A few years ago we changed the model and now a student writes a paper on a theme that is agreed upon by the committee chair and her committee and it should be on research that he/she was involved in already, which really helps since the sooner you get into research and have the momentum the better for you and your graduation. It also helps a lot on the job market to have some good papers already placed, if not published.

Below is a photo of my happy doctoral student with her committee members after a successful core exam today.

In the second year of your doctoral studies you will be taking more courses and this is, typically, the case even if you matriculated with a Master's. For example, in our program, the doctoral students very often come with a Master's in Industrial Engineering or several of my students have matriculated with Master's degrees in Civil Engineering with a focus on Transportation or Mathematics or even Statistics.

After the second year there is another Milestone to hurdle over - that of the Comprehensive Exam.  In some schools the comprehensive exam may be more of a dissertation proposal but in our program now this exam, as the name implies, should demonstrate breadth and depth of knowledge of a student based on coursework over two years. Again, a committee is formed, with a chair, and the committee prepares the exam, which the student works on over several weeks. After submission of the completed written part to the committee, an oral exam is held (not to be confused with going to the dentist).

When I was a doctoral student at Brown University I only had one exam and it was a long oral one.

Ideally, in the third year (usually at the end of the third year) a student should form a dissertation committee.  Some programs at UMass only require three members, including the chair. Ours requires four members and one member should be an external member.  The student prepares the dissertation proposal, which is written,  shares it with the committee, and, once a defense date is scheduled, then defends it orally with a presentation and is subject to questions. This is Milestone 3.

After the research for the dissertation is completed and the doctoral student's advisor is happy with the result a defense date for the dissertation is scheduled. This should be a pleasant and happy time (although I have been to defenses in which the student did not pass but this I believe is as much the fault of the advisor as of the student). The dissertation defense is Milestone 4 and, once the students passes this huge step, and the grad school and other paperwork is finalized and processed, the happy student can take part in gradation ceremonies to receive the PhD! Now you can be addressed as "Doctor!"

Next Friday, my 19th PhD student, Sara Saberi, will be defending her PhD. It is actually her second PhD. Some like to go through the above process more than once although it is certainly not common.

This will be an exciting occasion for both Sara and for her advisor as well as for the committee members. Sara will be an Assistant Professor at the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, which is  research university and an ideal place for her. She begins he new position later this month. I supported Sara for two years on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Future Internet Architecture (FIA) grant. Also, in our program doctoral students are required to teach and this helps them on the academic job market so, typically, a doctoral student would teach in their 4th year of our program.

Best of luck to all PhD students on their journeys!