Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program

I participated in the URA program in the summers of 2012 and 2014 under the supervision of Prof Henry Wolkowicz and the summer of 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Henry Wolkowicz and Prof Stephen Vavasis. I got the opportunity to do fascinating research on the graph partitioning problem and we were able to get some interesting results. I had a wonderful experience working with Henry and Stephen, I learned a lot from our discussions and meetings, in terms of how to gain intuition, how the problem fits into the larger framework, and on research methodology. We had weekly meetings for all students in the URA program. We got to hear lectures by C&O professors on a broad variety of topics. Moreover, all students gave presentations of their research at the end of the summer, which was a nice opportunity to learn how to give a research talk, and see what other students were working on. To sum up, it was a fantastic experience as we had direct mentoring from the faculty and great projects.

Through the URA program, I discovered my love of combinatorics and mathematical research. There are not a lot of other research opportunities for undergraduate students and I feel that the URA program provides a fantastic opportunity for undergrads to explore their research interests. I got to better understand the world of research, learned a variety of topics in Combinatorics and Optimization and had a better sense of my research interests when applying to graduate school.

I had the privilege of being in the URA program in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020. In Spring 2019, I worked on a project in Integer Programming (proving that the aggregation closure for covering integer programs is polyhedral) with Dr. Laurent Poirrier and Dr. Kanstanstin Pashkovich. In my second URA term (Summer 2020), I worked under the supervision of Dr. Jochen Koenemann on the weighted multicommodity flows over time problem (joint work with Madison Van Dyk).

Through my URA terms, I had the opportunity to explore some very fascinating topics and learned an incredible amount from my supervisors. I was also very fortunate to have learned some lessons of a different nature. Most importantly, I got a glimpse as to how one approaches research by watching how my supervisors worked on these problems and what they tried when our progress was stalled.

C&O’s URA program was my first introduction to research. Participating in this program was perhaps one of my most memorable experiences as an undergraduate student, and I would highly recommend it to any student who is interested in research.

I was very lucky to do URA with professor Levent Tuncel in my second coop term. Our projection was about finding a closed-form formula of projection onto homogeneous cones. After four-month hard working, even if we characterized lots of geometry properties of low dimensional homogeneous cones, we still failed to find such formula. However, I benefited a lot from this research journey. We read lots of related papers, conducted some numeric experimental for intuitions and had weekly meeting to share our progress. Not only I gained lots of amazing optimization knowledge but also learned a lot from how Levent thought about mathematical problems from his perspective.

After this wonderful research term, I was really impressed with the beauty and the modelling power of optimization I decided to have C&O as my second major and to pursue PhD in operation research. Also, when I was working as an algorithm researcher in Huawei, I also solved an unsupervised machine learning problem and published a patent via semi-definite optimization.

Overall, this URA is a turning point of my undergraduate years. Instead of seeking a Cali software engineer position like other computer science students, I started my research journey in optimization and may devote my life on it.

During my URA placements I was able to gain exposure to academic research and determine whether or not I wanted to pursue a Masters degree in mathematics. Each term I focused on my own research problem and met with my supervisor regularly to discuss ideas. I enjoyed the ability to participate in seminars and attend presentations on other areas of research. Also, through my participation in the program I was able to improve my presentation skills – which can be difficult in a regular co-op placement. In the URA program, undergrad students often interact with many of the graduate students and that helped me learn about their experiences in grad school. I was also fortunate to have had some opportunities to travel to academic conferences and meet researchers from other institutions.