About the Directed Reading Program

The McGill Directed Reading Program (DRP) pairs interested undergraduate students with graduate student mentors for weekly 1-on-1 meetings, so as to learn about research-level or research-aimed topics in mathematics and statistics in a casual setting. In this way, undergraduates can obtain guidance from someone who is further along the research path but can still relate to them as a peer.

The structure of each mentorship is up to the graduate and undergraduate student, but one hour-long meeting a week is suggested. Each undergraduate student should aim to write an expository paper about their project by the end of the term, with the help of their mentor. The papers will be reviewed and then posted on this website.

Also, at the end of the term, students can optionally present the results of their work at the DRP talks. There will be free food!

The idea for the DRP comes from the original program of the same name at the University of Chicago math department.

Questions or concerns? Graduate student interested in volunteering? Send an email.

Orientation

Applying

Applications for McGill's Winter 2024 Directed Reading Program are now open. Have a look at our list of mentors for this year and apply through this link by December 11th 2023.

If you were previously involved in the program and want to give feedback, a form is here.

Application is open to all undergraduate students in math and related fields who have interest in graduate school and research, possessing at least a little mathematical background (in general, a minimum of a one-year calculus sequence or equivalent is suggested, as well as some exposure to specific potential topics of interest). Students from math-adjacent areas like computer science and physics are encouraged to apply if they have interests in the intersection of the fields. The ability to commit some time to the project, of course, should also be considered.

If accepted, you will be paired with a mentor, and you will choose your topic/project together.

Past projects

Winter 2023

• Simon Chen, The Yamabe Problem
• Sebastian Filner, Introductory Category Theory, Grothendieck Topology and Presheaves
• Joel B. Newman, Descriptive Sets & Infinte Graphs
• Cleo Norris, Computer Assisted Explorations( Interactive Version )
• Keith Sheppard, Quadratic Forms: A Geometric Approach
• Xuzhu (Ruth) Wang, Introduction to the Einstein Contstraint Equations
• Anwyn Woodyatt, An Introduction to Gröbner Bases
• Zhaoshen Zhai, Moduli Spaces of Riemann Surfaces

Winter 2022

• April Niu, A winning strategy for Dots and Boxes (slides)
• Etienne Sebag, The Expectation-Maximization algorithm
• Antoine Labelle, Local-global principle in class field theory
• Sam Mayo, The coincidence that wasn't (slides)
• Yuyan Chen, Active contour (slides)

Fall 2019

• Shereen Elaidi, Building up to Lorentzian Causality Theory
• Zachary Feng, Quadratic Reciprocity via Number Fields
• Caitlin Hutnyk, I’ve got 99 vertices but a solution to Conway’s problem ain’t one
• Jonah Saks, Expository paper on the fundamental group
• Jacob Shkrob, Probabilistic analysis of simple random graph models
• Ran Tao, Gödel's constructible universe