I lived in an apartment with another program member from Duke University. Our apartment was located in the heart of Budapest, a mere four blocks from the Hungarian Parliament. In our neighborhood there were many small restaurants, elegant pastry and coffee shops, and many small artsy movie theaters. A Friday night on the town might include a dinner of deep fried mushrooms, Hungarian red wine, poppy seed strudel for dessert and a trip to the opera afterwards. --The cost of such an evening? Less than $10. Finding good food was not the major difficulty in Hungary. It was deciphering the language. Hungarian is one of the harder languages of the world for English speakers to learn. 

My cultural experience growing and adjusting was paralleled by my mathematical learning experience. In the BSM Program, I was blown away by the intelligence and quickness of the other students. Never before had I been in math classes where I had no idea what was going on for weeks at a time. In Budapest, I simply wrote down whatever the professor put on the board and took it home to try to understand it. The typical class has just four homework problems a week, but they were advanced applications of the lecture material. The questions usually needed an hour or two of thinking before any proof could be attempted. Each problem needed between two and five hours of work. The experience has left me with a more realistic picture of my own mathematical abilities while achieving confidence that I was able to solve some tough problems. 

Despite the work, I was able to do a lot of traveling. Nothing beats the feeling of hopping on a train for two hours and finding yourself in another country. In the spring I traveled about every other weekend. The highlights were a five day trip to Prague and Bratislava and spring break wandering around in Turkey. Overall, the experience I had in the BSM program provided a multifaceted challenge in academics and living conditions. It demanded such devotion and compromise that it has helped me to rethink and focus on the things I find valuable in life. 

My Summer /Sophomore Research Project 

by Sohil Parekh 

I spent the summer of 1996 as a Sophomore Researcher with

The first project I worked on was studying and spotting distribution courses that have, in the past decade, been popularly used to satisfy distribution requirements at the College. Information that resulted from the study will be considered in making Educational Policy Decisions and in conducting further research. 

My second project was a study of the Faculty Leave Program. I set up a database of Faculty Leave Applications and did several crosstab studies on this database, graphing Study vs Research Leaves and One-Semester vs One-Year Leaves, among others. 

The third project I worked on was a Feeder School Study for Admissions: I looked at data for the entering classes of the years 1992-1996 and identified, using several different geographic criterion, those high schools that regularly send us relatively large numbers of students. The results were one of the criterion used by Admissions Counselors in deciding which high schools to visit this Fall. 

The fourth project I worked on was setting up a First Year Database of the entering Class of 2000. This database was experimentally used by the Office of the Dean of Faculty to assign students to First Year Seminar Sections for this Fall, based on their preferences, academic interests, high school record, and several other factors. 

All of these projects culminated in formal presentations to Administration. 

The AMRE-SOREP research program with the Department of Mathematical Sciences was a great experience. I found that working with Administration was a stimulating challenge that helped me better understand the College of Wooster. It also helped me develop research and presentation skills, and gave me an opportunity to apply what I had learned in the classroom to the real world.