Bradley Monarch, a math and stats double major from Marine City, MI, will receive this year’s Excellence in the Discipline Award from the mathematics department. 

Bradley toured several universities when deciding where he wanted to continue his studies after high school, but he really liked the Grand Rapids area and was most influenced by the fact that he felt “at home” on the Grand Valley campus.  Math was always his favorite subject in school, but, like many of us, he wasn’t aware of the broad range of opportunities available to math students.  As a result, he declared a business major, seeing it as a way to incorporate math into his career.

As a freshman, Bradley took an introductory statistics course as part of the business major and realized how much he enjoyed it; that experience continued in subsequent math and stats classes.  Eventually, this realization, that he loved problem solving and the feeling that he could make sense out of new and difficult situations, led him to change his major to applied mathematics and to later add a statistics major. 

Before coming to Grand Valley, Bradley says that he always viewed math as a solitary pursuit.  One of the things he has enjoyed about his math classes here is working in small groups with others, sharing ideas and appreciating the variety of different approaches he and his fellow students could take to understand a problem. 

He has also been involved in mathematical activities outside of the classroom.  In addition to tutoring in both the math and stats centers, Bradley completed a research project, supervised by Professor Feryal Alayont, in which he studied edge covers of graphs and looked for patterns as the number of vertices increased.  Last summer, he also completed an internship with Charter Communications (Spectrum) working on the operations analysis team to develop mathematical models that describe the frequency of technician visits to customers’ homes.  In the end, he created an accurate model to predict the number of trouble calls over the next 30 days. 

Motivated by his increased understanding of how many opportunities are available to math students, Bradley founded the Applied Mathematics Club as a way to help other students see that mathematics can lead to a wide range of careers and to help younger students recognize steps they can take to make themselves more employable, such as pursuing an internship.  The club meets periodically and hosts speakers who describe what their day-to-day work experience is like and in what ways they use math in their careers.

Bradley is also this year’s co-president of the Grand Valley Tennis Club.  In this role, he coordinates with counterparts at other universities to organize events and plans travel and other logistics as the club competes around the region.  He’s also involved in several intramural sports; in addition to playing ultimate frisbee, his kickball and softball teams were intramural champions.  

Bradley has already passed the first of a series of actuarial exams, and, after graduation, plans to move to Florida and begin looking for a position as an actuarial analyst. 

He wants to say thank you to all of his math professors and cites them as being influential for both his learning and his personal growth.  We wish Bradley all the best as he begins this next phase of putting his mathematical talents to use, and we thank him for all the contributions he’s made to our department.