Diners were Ralph Greenberg, Doug Lind, Isaac Namioka, Hart Smith, Gunther Uhlmann, Ginger Warfield (UW faculty), Christian Skau (visiting faculty from Norway),Brian Browning, Michael Keynes, Linda Martin (graduate students)

Definitely a record-breaking start this time--a Big Idea before we had even sorted out the dinner order. It all started when Gunther (who had made a quick menu selection) asked Doug just what this PFF was that was offering him a free dinner just for being there. Doug's thumbnail sketch included the aspect that the PFF aims to promote better communication between faculty members and graduate students about the graduate program, and this was one such forum. Also that a recurrent theme has been the need for other such fora and the difficulty of coming up with a format for same. Christian described an ongoing series of lunch time seminars at his university at which faculty members and advanced graduate students spend fifteen or twenty minutes sketching a recent result, or something they have been tackling without success, or a neat idea that has arisen. The key thing is that whatever it is is described in terms such that it makes sense to everyone else and keeps them in touch. They have these at lunch time in the math lunch room, with edible goodies and coffee to go with them and everybody comes. Some of its ingredients are not duplicable--a small enough population so that everyone can comfortably function together all the time, and a lunch hour during which nobody's teaching. But the underlying idea sounded REALLY good, so we kicked it around a bit and it turned into a Friday afternoon seminar starting with a brief presentation and proceeding to discussion and (as Isaac put it) by analytic continuation into a pizza and beer festivity, to be organized by the graduate students and funded by the department and to happen in the Math Lounge. Major remaining issue was whether to call it the Mathematical Buffet or the Fluid Dynamics seminar.

The rest of the conversation did a fair amount of spiralling, so I will make no attempt at chronological order--more like thematic order. Actually, there were two major themes: helping students deal with the transition from course-phase to research-phase and helping them deal with the transition from student-phase to job-phase. The latter had a lot of aspects very closely tied in with the PFF mission, in that the day of the job offer in which lip service was paid to every aspect of the candidate's file except Research Results is thoroughly and unambiguously gone. Doug picked up a number of issues and items at a meeting of the AMS Task Force on Excellence in Somethingorother Relevant (apparently an excellent task force, despite a somewhat grandiloquent title.) One can think of them as "What should one put in a letter of recommendation?", but a better slant is "What experiences should a graduate student have had, and how can they be documented?" One thing for sure is good teaching experience and a faculty member who can say more than superficial things about it. But arriving at a position to say such things is a non-trivial undertaking. A route which a fortunate few are going to be able to take is being a Huckabay Fellow--a new opportunity in the process of being about to be announced by the graduate school, under which a graduate student and faculty member could apply together to co-teach a course, and the graduate student would get a quite respectable quarter's stipend for it. Elsewhere (Indiana, specifically) there is at least one math department gearing up to have such a co-teaching experience be part of the program for any doctoral student--but that's pretty overwhelming. Linda suggested perhaps some modified form where, say, four graduate students each teach their own section of some course, with a faculty member supervising and coordinating all at once. Clear benefits there, though how it could happen within our current structure is a little murky.

Another job-mnarket insight resulted from a conversation Doug had with someone from Colby College in Maine (cheers from Ralph, who has a friend on their faculty.) Colby is one of many excellent, small colleges with emphasis on teaching but a considerable interest in research--not at all a bad place to find oneself. But one universal property of such places is that the faculty absolutely has to function collegially-- there's not enough room in the systm for an isolationist or genuine weirdo, however brilliant. It's not quite clear how we need to prepare our students for that ("Now brush your teeth and stand up straight..."), but the current efforts to make them aware of how a faculty functions can't do any harm.

Two other ideas were mooted as having possible impact on a new Ph.D.'s marketability. Gunther suggested that a certain amount of background in Applied Mathematics would be a definite Good Thing. And Doug (citing a source which I have clean forgotten) indicated that currently a really hot item is Statistics.
And for The Word on writing letters of recommendation, we await the publication of Stephen Krantz'es upcoming volume on the subject.

Meanwhile, and recurrently, there was the other theme, for which the need is for someone to publish a travel guide to limbo. For the first portion of a graduate student's career the goals and guidelines are clear: get the blasted prelims out of the way (a brief excursion in the direction of discussing the prelims themselves was shot down on the basis that it might ruin everybody's digestion.) For the last part of a graduate student's career the goals and guidelines are clear: take that problem and shake, pummel and bully it until it yields a thesis. But in between...

Hart brought up one particular aspect of the period by asking the assembled students if they felt that too many courses were required of them. All three felt that the fifteen credit requirement was a definite burden (Michael was particularly articulate on the subject.) There was a brief pause while we tried to explain credit requirements to Christian, who looked somewhat bemused by the whole concept (I think Isaac filled him in on it further as we went along) and a longer pause while we tried to sort out just whose requirements they are--i.e., whobody is benefitting from the requirement, or alternatively put, why the department is stuck with it, which we have a feeling we are.Then we got back to the subject itself. It's another area where the extremes of the graduate career are taken care of--first year students take, and ought to take, and want to take (more or less) three five-credit basic courses, so they're OK. And advanced students have thesis credit and reading seminar credit, so they're OK. And meanwhile, back in limbo...

The consensus seemed to be that taking a lot of courses is not that bad PROVIDED it's voluntary and provided one can be slack with the work on the ones that turn out not to be leading where one wants to go. On the other hand, there ought also to be a legitimate way of not taking so many courses and being able to focus on reading papers and figuring out what field to head into and beginning to go deeper into that field. I think I heard from Gunther the suggestion that reading courses in quantity would be a good arrangement, but I may have glued together two bits of conversations that didn't actually go together. I know that at several points positive comments were made about the kind of seminar (like the one of Jack Lee's known as the Icewater Seminar) where students take the plunge into serious reading in a particular field by being responsible for reporting on papers from the field to a seminar of their peers.

Beyond the time allocation issue there's the more general issue of morale. Brian pointed out that one of the slightly sad aspects of the office scene is that in getting to the higher level, better offices to which rising seniority entitles them, students lose the camaraderie of the dungeon (but an offer to let them all stay did not meet with an enthusiastic reception.) Doug mentioned that at Nebraska they have a sort of cascading mentorship program--seniors mentoring newly-declared majors, new graduate students mentoring seniors, and so on up the line. An idea well worth pursuing, and I have a nasty suspicion that the reason we didn't is that I de-railed it. Sorry about that!