My weekend with 250 math students

At the end of January, I found myself standing in the Regents Ballroom of the Embassy Suites in Lincoln, Nebraska, pinning a poster to a board and trying to convince my hands to stop shaking. In a few minutes, mathematicians would start wandering through the room, and I would need to explain, clearly and confidently, why I think the Gini coefficient can help cities build fairer electric vehicle (EV) charging networks. This was at the twenty-eighth annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Wisdom in Mathematics (NCUWM), and it turned out to be one of the most energizing weekends of my college experience so far.

I am a junior mathematics major at Mount Holyoke, and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics covered all our travel and registration costs. The conference started on Friday afternoon. After checking in at the Embassy Suites, we walked to Nebraska Union for the opening session, which included the first plenary talk and a panel on careers in mathematics. Hearing panelists describe the wildly different directions their math degrees had taken them, from academia to national labs to industry, was eye-opening. That evening, we gathered for a banquet and a panel called “Random Bits of Advice,” which included candid, sometimes funny, sometimes unexpectedly moving advice from mathematicians at all stages of their careers. Someone said something along the lines of “the best career decision I ever made was one that terrified me.” That stuck with me for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday’s schedule was packed from morning to night. The day opened with a networking breakfast, followed by concurrent sessions, where undergraduates gave research talks. I sat in on several of these and was genuinely amazed by the range of presentations, everything from algebraic topology to mathematical biology to machine learning. It reminded me of how vast the world of mathematics really is.

Then came the poster session. My poster emerged out of research I conducted last summer at the University of California, Berkeley under Professor Ming Gu. The central question was as follows: When a city decides where to place new EV chargers, how does it ensure the placement is fair rather than simply efficient? Most existing models minimize average travel time or improve worst-case access, but they overlook how accessibility is distributed across the broader population. I built an optimization framework that uses the Gini coefficient, a metric originally developed to measure wealth inequality within a population, to evaluate how evenly charging access is distributed across all neighborhoods. By weighting this metric with social vulnerability factors, such as income and renter status, the model prioritizes communities that need infrastructure the most. I tested it on Seattle’s road network because the city has a strong EV adoption rate and publicly available data on existing charger locations, road networks and census demographics, making it an ideal case study. The results were promising: The model cut access inequality by over 22%.

Once the first few visitors stopped to look at my poster and started asking questions, the nerves gave way to something much better: genuine excitement. People wanted to dig into the details. How does the Gini approach compare to traditional min–max fairness? How do shortest-path algorithms scale to a network that large? One visitor told me she was working on a related resource allocation problem, and we ended up talking for 10 minutes, swapping ideas and scribbling down each other’s references. Those conversations reminded me of why I fell in love with applied math in the first place: The problems are real, the tools are elegant and people care about the answers. 

The afternoon brought another plenary talk, more undergraduate sessions and breakout discussions. The day wrapped up with a networking mixer over hors d’oeuvres, where I found it surprisingly easy to strike up conversations with people I had just met. Many of us were thinking about similar things: where to apply for Ph.D. programs, what kind of research we wanted to pursue and how to find our place in the broader math community.

Sunday morning closed out the conference with a final round of talks and the last plenary session. The panel that covered choosing a graduate program stood out to me the most. I am planning to apply to Ph.D. programs in mathematics next year, and hearing panelists talk openly about the doubts they had along the way made the whole process feel a little less daunting.

NCUWM was founded in 1999 to support and encourage women in mathematics, and that spirit of warmth and inclusion ran through every part of the weekend. Everyone I met at the poster boards, over meals and during the mixer was genuinely curious and encouraging.

Looking back, I came home with something that is hard to quantify: the feeling that I belong in this world. Mount Holyoke has given me so many opportunities to grow, from research mentorship to conference funding, and this trip to Nebraska was a powerful reminder of how much that support means.