<p>Umm, there's a lot of contradicting information about this, but does the MIT Blackjack Team still exist? </p>
<p>Also, how difficult is it to get into the grad school at MIT? I mean, I'm currently just starting UCI as a freshman, haven't even moved in yet, and I'm planning to go for a math major. I didn't do thatttt well or even have anything decided for my future during high school but now, I decided, if I want to go ahead with math MIT would be the best place to go. I do have a love for math and hope I feel this way years ahead. Going into my undergraduate school, it's almost a time to restart with my efforts and start clean and want to just get any and all advice I can with accomplishing my goal, before it's too late.</p>
<p>I think it still exists. I remember seeing calls for tryouts (during IAP?).</p>
<p>Each department has its own admissions process, so it’s not possible to say how difficult it is to get into MIT as a whole as a grad student, just how difficult it is to get into a particular program for a particular degree. Generally speaking, though, programs tend to very from pretty difficult to exceedingly difficult to get into – the graduate students at MIT are extremely qualified future scholars.</p>
<p>If you want to get into a top math PhD program (and at this stage, if you don’t know what your research interests are, it’s much wiser to think about “top math programs” rather than “MIT”), you should make an effort to do extremely well in your classes, to get to know professors in your department, and to get involved with academic research as soon as possible. (I don’t really know how this works for pure math – in lab science, where I am, you can work on a research project in a professor’s laboratory. Maybe mathboy98 will speak up.) Take your classes with an eye to what kinds of math really get you going, so you can choose a subfield to study intensively in graduate school, and learn about the work that different professors do. Read papers in the academic literature.</p>
<p>You will have to be one of the best math students in the country to be admitted to a top PhD program, but these things will help you get there.</p>