Please direct inquiries about our graduate program to:
grad@math.lsu.edu
Financial Aid
Contact
Several types of financial assistance are available to graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at LSU. These include teaching assistantships, research assistantship, fellowships, and tuition awards. Most graduate students receive some form of financial support; however, priority for support goes to PhD students, which includes all students who have applied to earn the PhD in Mathematics as their highest degree at LSU. It is understood that PhD students will normally earn an MS degree along the way, but a prior MS degree is not required to be a PhD student. The Department automatically considers each applicant for all available forms of financial aid. If your application is completed by January 15, then we will be able to consider you for all available types of financial aid. More information on the various types of the various types of financial support are presented below.
Graduate Assistantships
The majority of current and incoming mathematics PhD students are supported by Graduate Teaching Assistantships, which currently pay academic-year stipends from $20,550 to $21,350. If combined with a Graduate School Enrichment, the maximum stipend can be as high as $24,350 per academic year (9 months). Tuition and the nonresident fee are waived for Graduate assistants, but there are other fees that are required of all students. For students desiring to continue their studies in the summer, summer assistantships are awarded on the basis of seniority. There are also Research Assistantships and Service Assistantships which are funded by faculty grants supporting various projects in both research and education. The stipends for these vary considerably and can be supplemented by Enrichments as described below.
Graduate Assistant Duties
The academic year duties of a teaching assistant consist most often of teaching an average (over the academic year) of 4.5 credit hours per week of elementary mathematics, or an equivalent in other duties. However, most first-year teaching assistants do not teach: they have the equivalent in non-classroom duties.
Some of the typical duties of a graduate assistant are:
- Teaching a class such as College Algebra, Trigonometry, Business Calculus, or Calculus
- Conducting recitation sections for Calculus
- Working (primarily tutoring) in the College Algebra computer lab
- Grading
See here for a more detailed listing of Graduate Assistant duties.
All graduate students participate in a seminar called Communicating Mathematics to instruct them in good teaching methods, as well as in good skills for communicating mathematics for all purposes.
Graduate Assistantships are expected to continue through the fifth year of graduate study, with the possibility of support in a sixth year.