Dalesha Cartman
Professional Statement [ProfessionalStatement.pdf]
Dalesha Cartman
Professional Statement
My name is Dalesha Cartman and I am a Junior at Mississippi Valley State University. I became interested in math at a very young age. The person who helped peak my interest in math was my elementary school teacher from kindergarten to fourth grade, Mrs. Johnson. She taught me many things about math and made it seem easy and fun to engage in. As I progressed in age, math became my main focus in school. Though my focus was not mainly on math at the time, by college I knew that it was going to be my major. I find it easy to understand and engage in. Math is also definite and never changes.
In April 2010, I attended the Association of Computer and Information Science/Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions (ADMI) computer science conference where I met Dr. Linda Hayden. I received information about the Undergraduate Research Experience in Ocean, Marine, and Polar Sciences. I was accepted into the program and arrived at Elizabeth City State University on May 24, 2010. At the internship, the mentors taught us how to use Linux, Ubuntu, Mac computers, and other applications to help us throughout the program. We also learned how to collect water and dirt samples to test if are contaminated. We also did GPS training.
I was then put on the math team under the mentorship of Dr. Yolanda McMillian. The project my partner n I had to do for the summer program was to analysis surveys done by the other interns in the past summer programs to rate the effectiveness of the program. We first had to go through a mock Institutional Review Board (IRB) trial because we were using humans’ information. Next, we created Kwik surveys online to allow the students easier access for the survey. We had to learn statistics in order to do our project but a lot of the equation that we learned were in excel in we didn’t have to do them manually. We used Excel, Minitabs, and MatLab to do our project. My partner and I did not get a chance to finish our research because there was not enough data to find different trends within it. However, we were able to find enough significant data to pull out the null hypothesis of our research for different selections in our project.
This April I currently had a chance to attend another ADMI conference to present my research project from the past summer. It was held at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. My partner and I did the poster presentation where we presented it to three judges but was in a room full of other presenters. They later held the oral presentation for Grad and Undergrad students. It was a great experience to network with other people in my major and to meet people that are on the CReSIS board.
I have been given another opportunity to conduct research for an internship. The purpose of this project is to tutor middle school students and find out if the Math Sprint program helps increase the students’ EOG testing scores. This will allow me to work on my Mathematics Education major for the time being. I plan to apply to more internship that works with the testing of global warming effects, pure math, and computer technology. After receiving my bachelor’s degree, I plan on entering graduate school to obtain my master’s degree in Mathematics and later my Ph.D. My goal is to teach high school students while attending graduate school to get a better experience in the field of teaching. I’m really not sure what I want to do with my career at this point of time but I feel whatever I do, I want to be happy doing it. Later on in my life though, I would like to return to teaching. |
