Topology Students Workshop

The Topology Students Workshop (TSW) will be held at Georgia Institute of Technology during June 6-10, 2022. This conference is a 5-day research and professional development workshop for graduate students in the fields of geometric group theory, geometry, and topology. Its primary goals are to a) expose graduate students to a wide range of current research in topology, b) build their communication, networking, and problem-sharing skills, and c) give guidance on necessary but typically untaught aspects of the profession.

Approximately 50 graduate students will participate, guided by 10 mentors, who come from a wide range of career stages and represent a broad array of topics within geometry and topology including contact and symplectic topology, 3-manifolds, hyperbolic geometry, group actions, and complex dynamics. The conference provides the participants, especially those from underrepresented groups, with many tools that will help them to succeed as scientists at the highest levels, in graduate school and beyond.

For many of the students, the TSW is the first conference they attend and at which they present their own results. The workshop is designed to facilitate this experience (for instance, our first professional development session is an introduction to conferences and how best to benefit from them). The goal is to build confidence and research potential among students, as well as to build community.

The skills addressed here are not typically taught in grad school and can be disproportionately beneficial to students from minority groups, as indicated from responses from participants in previous iterations of the program. The professional development and research sides of the workshop run in tandem, with mentors giving guidance in both areas. The workshop includes structured sessions on networking and etiquette, the job application process, communication skills, and a panel discussion on career paths (which also involves mathematicians from organizations such as NSA, Amazon, Google, and private high schools).

Mentors also give research talks, both to model good communication and introduce their research areas (deliberately chosen broadly) and relevant problems to students who are embarking on a research career. Effective communication is a major theme: two evening sessions are devoted to workshopping presentations in small groups; the final presentations are videotaped and critiqued by those in attendance. The web site for the conference is http://tsw.gatech.edu

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.