Ideas for supporting Math & Stats at Queen's

The Math & Stats Department has a number of Funds of different kinds.

The Departmental Trust Fund supports the general work of the Department: Increasingly these funds are being used to support undergraduate activities, such as math club, welcome receptions, convocation receptions, undergrad travel to meetings and conferences, marking and peer-to-peer tutoring, etc. Donations in any amount at any time are most gratefully received for the work of this fund.

The Peter Taylor Math Camp Fund: Math Quest is a summer camp for high school girls that focuses on problem solving. Our hands-on sessions lead by female mathematicians, physicists and statisticians are designed to engage young women and pique their interest in mathematics and other sciences.  Your gifts will help allow more girls to attend, help us recruit kids with potential, give graduate students an opportunity to teach and mentor, and fund activities to inspire and engage the next generation of mathematicians.

The A.J. Coleman Research Fellows Endowment Fund was established to allow alumni to support the Coleman Postdoctoral Program, which brings postdoctoral fellows to the Department to spend three years doing research with the faculty and teaching in our undergraduate program. The Coleman Fellows bring new ideas and energy to the Department while developing and establishing their independent research programs and careers.

The Norman Miller Endowment Fund was established in honour of Norman Miller, Queen's Math professor and beloved teacher from 1919 until 1959. Its purpose was to support senior undergraduate students working as teachers for first-year students or for high school students who visit the department.

The Ernest C. Gill Undergraduate Assistantships Fund was established by the Gill family to support senior undergraduate students providing teaching assistance to first-year students.

The Keyser Fellowship supports students to develop the competencies they will need following graduation.

You can make a gift to any of these funds by going to http://www.givetoqueens.ca/mathstats, where you'll be redirected to the Office of Advancement's secure website.

These funds are all supported by alumni donations.

Another interesting option for alumni is to set up your own named "Expendable Fund"––a fund in which an annual donation is targeted for a particular purpose and is used for that purpose each year. We currently have two of these: the Coleman Assistantships and the Poels Assistantships. These programs operate in our large first-year courses. The "assistants" are students enrolled in the course who identify themselves early in the course as being on top of the material, and their duties are to lend their understanding to help fellow students in weekly one-on-one tutorial sessions. One of the big thrusts of the University's new Academic Plan is "community," in all its many forms, and that's what this program is all about. It strengthens the sense of community in the course as a whole, and, walking into the middle of a tutorial session, one has a sense of an array of intense micro-communities. The first of these was endowed in the memory of John Coleman, Head of the Department from 1960 to 1980, who died in Sept 2010, and the second, by the Poels' family, in memory of Greg Poels, a math grad of 2009 who died suddenly shortly after obtaining his degree.

Such a fund can be established with a commitment of $2,500 per year for five years. In both the above cases, this gift provides an honorarium of $500 for five assistants each year. If you wish to pursue this idea, please get in touch Peter Taylor at peter.taylor@queensu.ca or 613-533-2434.