This award will partially support the November 2020 and November 2021 Field of Dreams Conferences, to be held on the University of Minnesota campus. The Field of Dreams Conference is organized by the Math Alliance, an organization whose goal is to increase the number of students from backgrounds underrepresented in the mathematical sciences who earn doctorates in those fields, and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. Approximately 200 undergraduate and terminal MS students will attend the conference, and about 80% of those will be underrepresented minorities. All funds from this award will be used to pay the cost of attendance for some of these students. The conference coordinates with the Math Alliance's Facilitated Graduate Admissions Process (F-GAP), which has helped place an average of about 80 Math Alliance Scholars per year in graduate programs the last six years with very good retention to this point. The conference is an essential part of a program to produce a more diverse professional mathematical workforce. In addition, there are events at the conference which assist faculty in mentoring practices and help academic departments transform their cultures to be more inclusive and supportive of student success.
The Field of Dreams conference has several purposes, including: providing information about all aspects of the mathematical sciences professions to students wishing to pursue doctoral studies; providing information about summer research programs and opportunities at the NSF-funded Mathematical Sciences Institutes; facilitating appropriate placement of Math Alliance students in graduate programs; providing professional development in mentoring and cultural competence for our Math Alliance faculty; and serving as a clearinghouse for employment opportunities for new (and recent) Math Alliance doctoral recipients. More information about the Math Alliance is available at www.mathalliance.org. Material from previous years' conferences, are available at https://mathalliance.org/field-of-dreams-conference/, and the page for the 2020 conference is https://mathalliance.org/2020-field-of-dreams-conference/.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
