The Department of Mathematics is offering its popular “calculus alternative” math course for the third time this summer, enabling students to use mathematic analysis in real-world situations.
Among liberal arts majors, ‘Math of Social Choice” is the notorious “math for non-math people” course, often coveted by upperclassmen looking to fill their final distribution requirements. The course is often so popular each semester, that only students with the first registration time slot have a chance to register. To remedy this, Kim Ruane, Associate Professor of Mathematics created a new math course, “Financial Mathematics” last summer, in order to expand students’ options of non-calculus based math courses.
“It was one of my crazy ideas…to develop a new course that would be something that we could offer year-round for our [students to fulfill their] math distribution requirements,” Ruane explained.
Using the Summer as a Platform
“I’ve done a lot of experimentation in my [summer courses], and I think they’ve all been very, very successful, and good for the students…and then good for me, because I can take that over into the next semester.”
Ruane explained that during the fall and spring terms, her curriculum had to match that of her co-professors (who simultaneously teach the same course), where as during the summer, she has the freedom to teach a more self-designed curriculum.
“[The Summer] was a good playground for testing out courses to smaller groups of students.”
Luckily for Ruane, her initial experimentation with the coursework proved to be successful.
“The [first] summer class was absolutely wonderful—the students knew they were the guinea pigs, we were clear on that from the beginning,” she said. “They were extremely motivated and open to whatever I wanted to try.”
Although Ruane’s first summer “Financial Mathematics” course garnered positive reviews, the enormous success of the fall course was largely unprecedented.
“I taught it the very next fall, thinking ‘I don’t know how many students are going to sign up for it,’ but I opted for an 8:30 a.m. time slot, trying to keep it small, and I still had 80 students and a waitlist,” Ruane said.
Although many students opted to take the course during the fall term, many students do so during the summer along with Math 9 (Math of Social Choice) in order to fulfill their two math distribution requirements.
Ruane explained that last summer, Math 9 and Math 10 (Financial Mathematics) were offered during the two different summer sessions, whereas this summer, the two courses will be offered simultaneously during the first session.
“I’ve arranged it so that Math 10 and Math 9 complement each other,” Ruane said. “So students can get their entire liberal arts math requirement out of the way in six weeks—to me that’s huge.”
Looking to the Real World
Though much of the appeal of “Financial Mathematics” is rooted in its non-calculus-based curriculum, liberal arts students also tend to flock to the course because of its real world relevance.
“I think that students want something that’s a little bit more ‘real-world applicable,’ or something that they see that’s just more direct than what they’ve seen in some of the other classes,” Ruane said.
In order to relay such “real-world” skills, Ruane incorporates several projects requiring students to make informed financial decisions on their own. Perhaps the most pertinent project to her students’ lives is the credit card project.
“The credit card project was the high light of the course: I gave them an actual real-world credit card statement: I wanted them to really understand how credit cards work,” said Ruane.
To complete the project, Ruane’s students had to look at how interest is currently compounded on credit cards, and analyze the outcome of a bill.
While acquiring a credit card is certainly an issue that many college students can relate to, Ruane also offered another project involving buying a car—something that students will undoubtedly encounter in their post-collegiate life. In completing the “car-buying” project, students are asked to compare the financial implications of taking out a five year loan to purchase a vehicle, versus taking a two-year lease with a three-year buying option at the end, and then choosing which of the two would be a more financially sound decision.
This summer, Ruane is hoping to complement the “car-buying project,” with a “home-buying project,” which will involve much of the same research, but include new challenges like accounting for escrow and mortgages. Ruane explained that it’s projects like these that help her students to make informed analyses about financial decisions.
“I think part of what my students get out of the course [is] confidence,” she said. “I knew [these projects] would get their attention, but also make them realize that it’s just another way to analyze something. Making informed financial decisions doesn’t always work out to ‘what’s the smallest, what’s the cheapest,” but that there are a huge spectrum of things that you need to consider.”
In addition to the credit card and car/home-buying projects, Ruane also gave her students a more niche assignment: to design and compare their own fundraising projects.
“I give them some creative leeway: the fundraising project was very open-ended. I basically said there were no rules, you just have to design two fundraising projects and compare them from a mathematical viewpoint,” Ruane said. “And then I asked for a conclusion at the end where students told me why they would choose these projects for their organization.”
Ruane hopes that her course will help play up the skills her students’ have already acquired from other courses.
“My goal for the course is to, rather than intimidate them with a lot of math that I know, is that I wanted to see their strength, which is, I think, writing. And saying, ‘ok math will be a component of something I do,’” she said. “[My students] have to do a lot of writing: the whole course is word problems. To me, that’s their strength, and they enjoyed that part of the course, along with learning some decent, non-trivial math.
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