The Department of Mathematics is pleased to announce that Professor Alexander Yong will be the first recipient of the George Francis Student Engagement Award. This grant will provide $12,500 in funding to Yong’s Illinois Combinatorics Lab for Undergraduate Experiences (ICLUE).
Yong has been with the department since 2008, and his research focuses on combinatorics and algebra. Having overlapped with George Francis’s time as a professor, Yong is especially honored to receive an award bearing Francis’ name. In Yong’s words, “George was well-liked by students. He dedicated his career to education, mentoring, and engagement. The name of the award is well-suited.” On a personal note, Yong and his family would attend George and Bettina Francis’s annual Kinderfasching event, which included a puppet show for kids.
Yong initiated ICLUE in Spring of 2017 after reflecting on his experience with students seeking letters of recommendation for graduate programs. Yong recognized the need for extended, individualized mentorship of these talented young people. Thus, he started the ICLUE program to offer trainees a system to work with faculty mentors, as well as those mentors’ postdoctoral scholars and graduate students.
ICLUE is designed to give students a sense of graduate school and extends through the student’s entire undergraduate career. The program is tailored to students’ interests and career goals. This “grad-lite” experience includes seminars and discussions, invitations to talks, meetings with visitors, and funding for conference travel. An NSF grant awarded in 2020 provided funding for domestic students. However, the George Francis Student Engagement Award will allow ICLUE to support additional students regardless of nationality.
Beyond academic opportunities, Yong highlights one of ICLUE’s greatest benefits: the community it fosters. Yong encourages alumni of the program to keep in contact, and over the years, a growing network of students, faculty, and alumni has developed. Participation in the program allows mentors to share rich stories of their students’ success when it comes time to write letters of recommendation, while providing students with a community of peers that are interested in pursuing advanced mathematics. Indeed, Yong happily relates how two alumni who met through the program went on to get married while each completing their doctorates in mathematics.
Most of ICLUE’s members are recommended for the program after excelling in coursework under a potential mentor. However, Yong encourages any interested student to reach out to him. Although ICLUE prepares students for grad school, the ultimate goal is to help them discover the path best suited to them. As Yong puts it, “When you’re starting out, you might like math but aren’t sure if you want to pursue it as a career. It’s also a success when a mentee discovers through ICLUE that they don’t want to pursue graduate studies. We help people figure out what they truly want to do with math.”