CUSE Spotlights
Jose Garcia
Jose Garcia '20
McNair Scholar
Major: Mathematics
In 2019, Jose Garcia was a GVSU McNair Scholar, studying automated conjecture making as a part of the summer research cohort. Today, he’s a pure mathematics PhD student with a research fellowship at the University of New Mexico.
“I can honestly say that the foundations you develop in undergraduate mathematics research are exactly what you use for graduate mathematics; your problems are just more abstract,” says Garcia. “With mathematics, once you develop a problem that you're going to work on, you don't really know where that problem's going to lead you. You study established theory to get a better idea of what this mathematical object looks like, and then, best case scenario, you use those as puzzle pieces with your own ideas to answer the problem. Or, you come up with all these new things, but you don't actually prove or disprove the problem that you started out with. You just prove a lot of other things.”
Having now attended many mathematics conferences, Garcia identifies two main ways that researchers will present these abstract problems to their fellow scholars.
“Some people will literally show their results and read their proof word by word,” says Garcia. “Which you'll understand if you're in their exact field, but... well, usually you're not in that exact field. Another way that I’ve learned is to present ‘here’s the problem, here’s what it means.’ Even if it isn’t someone’s expertise, you can still dedicate the time to describe and build your question in people’s minds. And then you say, this is how I solve it, and you highlight the important parts that are your new contributions. McNair was my first time having an audience to practice that with, which was really helpful.”
That opportunity for discussion, both with his peers and mentors, remains Garcia’s favorite aspect of the McNair program.
“It was interesting because there were other people who were also doing research in your field, so you always had another student to talk with, both about your ideas and your confusion,” Garcia says. “There was always support, whether from peers or advisors. I always had second or third eyes on my work if I wanted it.”
Garcia found that connecting with McNair scholars outside of his field proved helpful as well, just in different ways.
“It was a really nice way to meet other people who are not in math,” says Garcia. “Maybe it's like this for other fields too, but in math research, you're working on your problem for hours and hours a day. At the end, you just want to relax, but it really creeps into your mind and it’s hard to shake off. When you’re hanging out with someone, you want to get your mind off your research, so it was great to talk to people with totally different experiences— to have people outside of math to talk, quote unquote, ‘normally’ with. That really helped me, as a built-in part of the program.”
Learn more about opportunities for undergraduate research at gvsu.edu/ours.
Interest Area(s)
Mathematics
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