<p>Is there any one who has done or is doing a math/applied math major? </p>
<p>Also, is there a website with the ratings for Columbia professors? </p>
<p>Thanks in advance</p>
<p>denzera is the man for the first part of ur question...either PM him or wait till he responds...</p>
<p>you can go to <a href="http://www.culpa.info%5B/url%5D">www.culpa.info</a> ...that has student reviews of profs at columbia.</p>
<p>applied math '06. ask away.</p>
<p>What career can you expect with a major in applied math? what about applied phyz?</p>
<p>Many engineering companies hire applied math and physics majors. The applied math graduates work on algorithm development and optimization techniques that are math intensive. A lot of systems engineers are applied math majors.</p>
<p>consulting and finance are very interested in you as well. doing decently in an applied math curriculum while also (shockingly) having social skills will get you a lot of job offers out there. I had offers from consulting firms, hedge funds and software-industry startups my senior year.</p>
<p>and yeah, there's always the choice of doing something topical, be it research, or some sort of optimization/operations role in industry. there are aspects of applied math research that interest me, but i'm not sure i would've loved it the way i would've needed to.</p>
<p>Denzera: what about course load? How does it compare to mech. eng.?</p>
<p>probably more thinking but less work when measured in hours. It all depends on how good you are with abstractions. MechE will have you doing a lot more with physical modeling tools and calculating real-world scenarios... AM will be dealing with a lot of equations and more abstract stuff.</p>
<p>With applied math, what type of ec's are good to do at columbia? other than joining the undergrad math society and trying to get reu's. also, is it impossible to get an reu after freshmen year? if so, what else is good to do? just reading sessions? or is everything a lot more involved in gpa in college?</p>
<p>Denzera: what career does applied phyz lead too, besides academia?</p>
<p>Re: EC's</p>
<p>Look, most people I know at columbia don't do "themed" ECs. They do activities for fun, and the majority are non-academic related. I did an a cappella group, ultimate frisbee, goju-ryu karate, some tech stuff for the spectator, a small amount of political stuff, and a whole lot of mario kart. Did I enjoy being applied math? Sure. Did I like the classes and professors? Hell yes. I even did a research paper on my own, because there was a particular subject on which I had something to say, mathematically speaking. I suppose many math types join, uh, there's some professional organization called SIAM that has stuff going on, but it's not what you'd call a rocking good time. By and large, if you're in a highly abstract field like physics or math (or even compsci, save the robotics team), academic-related ECs are not all that typical.</p>
<p>Re: Career options for applied physics</p>
<p>By "academia" I hope you mean "research", because there are thousands of companies out there who can't WAIT to get their hands on a smart, highly qualified person who can wrap their mind around something like theoretical physics. The number of engineering firms who'd love you is huge, and the number of governmental, government-sponsored, and private-industry places who deal directly with physics. </p>
<p>One example: An old girlfriend of mine graduated from Smith with a degree in physics and now works at a firm that develops modeling software to assist car manufacturers in understanding fluid flow dynamics (well, not JUST car manufacturers, but those are their main clients). She flies to germany on an as-needed basis to talk to Porsche, BMW, etc. The people who started her firm developed a nifty algorithm to model fluid flow very fast, and people like her work on refining the details, improving the software, and applying it to complex problems.</p>
<p>On top of that you have the firms out there who just want smart, analytically-minded people, however they can get 'em. Those include consulting firms (both tactical-level ones like IBM and Accenture, and strategic-level ones like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc), and the entirety of the financial world (including I-Banks like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the thousands of Hedge Funds out there, trading firms, research firms, etc). Those are the places that, instead of giving you the psychic income of trying to increase the world's knowledge, will merely pay you very well instead.</p>
<p>The greatest global shortage of talent right now is in engineering. Even if what you want to do is help build a developing country's infrastructure, via a nonprofit, a degree in physics can only help you. Firms in foreign countries will want you (if you can scale down your salary expectations). There really is no shortage of opportunities.</p>
<p>That said, I discovered my sophomore year that Quantum Mechanics (physics 2601) is an absolute beast, and after spending a semester putting in 30 hours a week on that class and somehow scratching out a B+, I decided I wasn't smart enough to do physics (and thus wimped out into math). Caveat emptor.</p>
<p>So then for applied math the main (and pretty much only) thing grad schools look at is gpa, major gpa, and GRE scores?</p>