Tyburski Receives 2023 Student Mentoring Award

Brady Tyburski, PRIME mathematics education doctoral student, has received the 2023 Outstanding Doctoral Student Mentor Award at MSU.

This award includes a $1,000 fellowship funded by The Graduate School, and recognizes a doctoral student who is a strong mentor—engaged in sustained mentoring activities at MSU that help other graduate or undergraduate students succeed in their own research.

In Fall 2020, Brady founded a weekly seminar for first and second year graduate students called PRIME Time. The goal was to create a space that provided academic mentorship and socio-emotional support for graduate students by graduate students in the PRIME program. Brady’s fellow students provided testimonials on how impactful this seminar has been for them, especially during the pandemic. PRIME Time has continued to run in the time since, led each year by a new coordinator from the cohort of second year graduate students.

Since 2021, Brady has been coordinating the Mathematics Learning Research Group (MLRG) seminar, a biweekly professional development seminar for mathematics education graduate students across various doctoral programs related to mathematics education. In addition to organizing seminars from outside experts on topics such as how a journal article review process works, Brady has been instrumental in getting graduate students to present their own research projects while facilitating feedback from the group. He has held leadership roles in the PRIME Graduate Student organization and was elected to serve on the Council of Graduate Students.

Several students commented on how Brady is always willing to give of his time to mentor them, especially in ways that help them achieve their own goals.  The student nominators wrote, “We truly believe that Brady has helped our mathematics education community connect with one another, learn from each other, and grow together.”

Brady commented, "When I developed the initial idea for PRIME Time, it was the beginning of the pandemic, and I sensed an urgent need for community — for myself as well as for my fellow graduate students who were just getting started at MSU. The fact that this program has sustained in the years since and continues to be a supportive space for incoming cohorts of graduate students is one of my proudest accomplishments while in PRIME."

He continued, "This award is just icing on top of the cake and further affirms my continued service and research efforts around supporting emerging scholars in mathematics education. But to be clear, I could not have received this award without the backing of a supportive graduate student community who have helped make these ideas into reality. Thank you, in particular, to Katie Westby who has been a consistent partner in making most of these efforts succeed, my executive board members while I was PRIME GSO President, and to Sheila Orr and Kristin Doherty, who co-coordinated MLRG with me."

In addition to honoring Brady, The Graduate School will also recognize recipients of the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award and the Outstanding Graduate Program Community Award (which PRIME received in 2019) at an awards ceremony in September.

Congratulations, Brady!

 

Article above added to and modified from text provided by The Graduate School.