Abstract: Increasingly, industries hiring mathematicians want their new hires to have experiences that extend beyond the classroom. Therefore, offering students the opportunity to participate in nontraditional activities during the academic year is a plausible and attractive option for many students.

In this talk, we will discuss the challenges of bringing collaboration with real business, industry, or government (BIG) into academia. We will talk about the experience of mentoring undergraduate students in multiple data-enabled research projects, based on original real-world problems provided directly by businesses and industry. We highlight differences and challenges compared to traditional research. We will discuss examples of such collaborations.

We will address the lessons we learned from these activities, such as quantitative analysis of student exit surveys, significant outcomes, and structural analysis of research projects. Our study is based on over 50 major projects with 12 different companies, businesses, and government labs involving over 150 undergraduate students.

Bio: Mihhail Berezovski is a tenured Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences and program coordinator for the Data Science track within the Bachelor of Science in Computational Mathematics program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He is a graduate of the Tallinn University of Technology where he spent several years in the Institute of Cybernetics.