Policy about summer students

Every year, I get many requests from students at the under-graduate and graduate level who want to do projects in summer. In the kind of mathematics that I do, a project at an undergraduate level or at a first year graduate level, means reading, understanding and solving problems on a known topic in mathematics. This involves, to begin with, a careful selection of a piece of existing good mathematics that is accessible in the sense that it is not too hard to grasp for a student. At the same time, the topic has to be interesting. This leads to a difficult task of choosing a topic that is not trivial and not too advanced. Needless to say, the aptitude and the training of the student and my own interests finally dictate the choice of topic.

Usually, a summer fellow spends about eight weeks here. My aim is to have regular interactions, about thrice a week, so that towards the end of the duration, the summer fellow has a fairly good idea or a good glimpse of a new sub-area of mathematics. Given the time that will be required to do a serious job, I usually accept no more than two summer fellows.

Apart from the academic part, there are other issues associated with a summer fellow. Accommodation is one of them. Finding an accommodation for a long duration in summer is practically impossible. In addition, it will be appreciated if the summer fellows spare me the logistics and paperwork. It is the summer fellow's responsibility to figure out the rules and regulations pertaining to the funding agency, the institute and the department and pursure appropriate paperwork if necessary.

In view of all these, I request all prospective summer fellows not to write to me. Instead, please apply to established summer programs and choose to come to this department while applying to the summer program. I mention here two such programs. The first one is the Summer Research Fellowship Program of the academies, http://web-japps.ias.ac.in:8080/fellowship2018/ The second one is the summer fellowship program of JNCASR.