University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh's INFORMS chapter's mission is to prepare our graduate students for academia and industry, host talks from top researchers in the field of operations research and manufacturing and provide fun events so students can take a break from studying. This semester we hosted alumni from the banking industry to share their experiences and discuss the skills needed in industry today, organized a Python workshop covering Pandas, NumPy and Scikit for data science applications, and held a Q&A session with some of our department's undergraduate students to address their questions about joining grad school. To prepare our students for their talks at the INFORMS annual meeting, we held several practice sessions where students presented to each other and received feedback about their respective talks. Additionally, we held two student/faculty mixers with cake and root beer floats, a game night with the CMU INFORMS Chapter, and celebrated Thanksgiving. During this year's INFORMS Annual Meeting, our chapter was honored to receive the INFORMS 2018 Student Chapter Annual Award at the Magna Cum laude level. In the future, we are planning to hold the Annual INFORMS Trivia Night, have additional workshops and host Pitt alumni in local industry, and researchers from other schools.
Auburn University
The INFORMS Student Chapter at Auburn University (AU) is working tirelessly to promote Operations Research and Management Science at our university. In Spring 2018, we held three great events and the election for the new board was conducted. We started the events by inviting Mr. Ventimiglia from the AU Office of the Vice President to talk about how to write proposals and how to apply for research grants for our members. We hosted a LaTeX tutorial and we visited the Kia Motors Manufacturing in Georgia. The chapter kicked off the Fall 2018 semester with collaborating on a social barbeque event on campus and continued the semester with a seminar to introduce how students can use library resources efficiently by inviting Mr. Wohrley from AU library. The students who were presenting at the 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting had a chance to share their work with their peers in the department during the chapter’s Social Presentations event. Also, the chapter provided five Travel Grants to ISE students to attend 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. In recognition of outstanding participations and performance, Auburn University Student Chapter received the 2018 “INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award” at the level of Summa Cum Laude.
Website: http://informsatau.wixsite.com/chapter
University of South Florida
The INFORMS student chapter at University of South Florida (INFORMS@USF) was established in 2005 with the main goal of educating USF students about different aspects of Operations Research and Management Science and expose them to the rich opportunities a career in industrial engineering can offer. Since then, our members have become actively involved in a vast variety of activities and have passed on their experience from one generation to another to maintain the chapter’s excellence. Although our chapter is fairly young, in the past 10 years it has been nationally recognized with 5 Summa cum laude, 3 Magna cum laude, and 2 cum laude student chapter awards and a Judith Lieberman prize awarded at the INFORMS annual meetings. The chapter also received a Magna Cum Laude award at this year’s INFORMS annual meeting in Phoenix for its activities in 2017-2018.
INFORMS@USF holds and coordinates many activities that benefit its members, the IMSE department at USF and the community at large. Some of these activities include: lecture series featuring distinguished guest researchers, social events, workshops and boot camps, community services, social activities, and community engagement with organizations and companies in the area. The chapter also coordinates with the Student Government to receive travel grants for non-presenting Masters and PhD students to provide them the much needed experience at INFORMS annual meetings. The chapter is recently collaborating with business and medical schools at USF to increase the chapter membership, and also firmly establishing its social media footprint. Furthermore, in various collaborative efforts, our members are applying OR and game theory techniques in broad areas of knowledge, including primary care, emergency care, dynamic pricing, contracts/market design, electric vehicles based shared mobility, and design of algorithms to efficiently solve OR and game theory problems.
Website: http://informs.eng.usf.edu/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/INFORMS_USF
University of Massachusetts Amherst
UMass Student Chapter of INFORMS hosted multiple exciting events in the academic year 2017-2018. We started Fall 2017 with a social event where we enjoyed the lovely, fun New England tradition of apple-picking in a local orchard while also learning about the local fresh produce supply chain. As part of our INFORMS Speaker Series we hosted several talks by eminent researchers on topics from using social networks to improve driving safety to wildfire management.
It was exciting to launch the chapter’s YouTube Channel where interviews with our guest speakers are posted regularly. Through this initiative we aim to obtain and share insights about research topics as well life as an academic. Like every year we organized the event “Tune-ups for INFORMS Conference”, where students presenting at the conference practice their talks and receive feedback from faculty as well as peers. During Spring 2018, we continued our speaker series with five more guests. One of our most popular and exciting events that we have been hosting in the Spring semester for the past two years is STEM Slam, a science communication competition open to undergraduates and graduates which has helped us in reaching out to other STEM departments across campus. It was wonderful to be recognized with the Magna Cum Laude Award at INFOMRS Annual Meeting in 2017 and the Cum Laude award at this year’s meeting in Phoenix for our efforts.
Website: https://blogs.umass.edu/umassinf/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UMassINFORMS
You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClVaXgOJ6wO6xRUMmcJ2_RQ
Mississippi State University
The INFORMS Student chapter at Mississippi State University supports the growing interest in operations research (OR) and management science (MS) fields. We emphasize on developing academic, professional, and interpersonal skills among the student members providing a means of communication and networking among people working in OR/MS that in turn opens the window for professional and educational collaboration and enhanced opportunities. Each year we organize several information sharing sessions including seminars, professional training workshops, inviting guest speakers, and some career development events. In Fall 2018, the INFORMS Student chapter at MSU organized a social event inviting the members of other student chapters at MSU. This event was organized with a view to boost the relationships with researchers in other fields and to get acquainted with the activities hosted by other chapters. This helped us in getting some valuable insights to make our community even stronger. We also participated in INFORMS Annual Meeting 2018 at Phoenix, Arizona where we received the INFORMS 2018 student chapter award at Cum laude level. We have devoted, enthusiastic members with strong ambitions to support and extend the goal of our student chapter in the upcoming years. We also intend to enhance our collaborative efforts to boost the success of the student chapter.
