<p>My D spent this past Spring in the BSM program in Hungary. Run by St. Olaf's University, it takes students from across the country. Her friends in the program included students who came from Harvard, Yale, U/Wisconsin, Williams, and Rutgers, among others.</p>
<p>It's a very good program, "pre-graduate school" in many respects. Some people did have culture shock of various kinds but Budapest is a great city and students were able to go on long weekends to Vienna, Cracow, Sweden, Istanbul, Crete, Florence, and a lot of other places in addition to participating in a very tough math program.</p>
<p>If anyone has any follow-up questions, please feel free to ask here.</p>
<p>Right. To participate you have to be approved by your home college and then be approved by the BSM program. The only Math program that's possibly tougher is a smaller one in Moscow. At least a couple of BSM students this Spring found that their preparation at their home college wasn't as a good as they thought it had been.</p>
<p>So does the program offer a standard set of courses for visiting students, or can you take whatever is next in your major sequence? What's the balance like between work (and how hard is it) vs. travel and fun?</p>
<p>I don't know for sure but I think a lot of colleges work it so that you pay your normal tuition to your "home" school and they take care of the program. The housing costs--there are no dorms, you either share an apartment or stay with a Hungarian host family--are trivial in comparison to the US and you also can eat very well (a lot of eating out) very inexpensively as long as you watch your beverages, which can be expensive (e.g., don't order orange juice and bottled water is an American affectation). </p>
<p>Balance between work and fun depends on the student and what courses are selected. Everyone takes a Hungarian language course (Math courses are in English). D took Combinatorics and Topology, the former being one of the program's signature courses. She also took a History of Mathematics elective. Most students take two "heavy" Math courses but some take three; some choose courses with respect to preserving GPA, others just wade in. D was taking a fifth class, a Modern Algebra class, that she dropped just before mid-terms; homework for that one class was running about 20 hours per week. I believe that MA is one of the other signature classes but it had a reputation as a ball buster. The syllabus for one of the classes was identical to a Stanford graduate class and the sense I had in general was that the classes compared to top undergraduate classes and low- to mid-graduate classes. </p>
<p>In addition to travel opportunities--e.g., a lot of students went to Istanbul over Spring break--probably the most common entertainment was community dinners at various apartments, though I do know that one dinner was the designed aftermath of a city-wide photo scavenger hunt game.</p>
<p>The mass transit system is excellent and the city feels very very safe. The caveats are try to avoid cabs (many are illegal cabs, Mafia run, with extortionate rates for foreigners), be wary of pickpockets (widely given advice but I don't think anyone in the program was victimized), and, for the guys, don't fall for the buying pretty "Czech" girls drinks for companionship...a couple of the guys in the program actually fell for that scam the first week or two there.</p>
<p>There's another Budapest "abroad" program run in the same building as BSM but it's not very rigorous at all and there wasn't a lot of connection between their students and the BSM students. In fact, the BSM students were pretty much their own closed community...there wasn't as much connection with Hungarian age-peers except for the BSM students who made clubbing a focus of their recreation.</p>
<p>Anything I haven't covered or if anyone wants expansion/amplification, please ask.</p>
<p>That sounds really cool. You got DS's attention with Combinatorics! (I'm not surprised that's a signature course -- I read that Lazlo Babai at Chicago was involved in establishing the BSM program and I'm sure he had input!) DS is just a senior, but the quality of the program sounds quite interesting. Thanks for the info!</p>
<p>Thanks, TheDad, for the description of the Budapest Semester in Mathematics. I've heard about it before from a Harvard math major who really liked it. It sounds like a great experience for a math major.</p>
<p>Sounds also like an experience that can make some feel humble. The way they study sciences in Eastern Europe is way different from what we are used to. Much harder...I am talking from experience here.
Anyone has more info about the Moscow program?</p>
<p>I'm studying abroad with BSM right now (Wesleyan University is my home school) and I agree that it's an amazing experience. The math is certainly very challenging - I'm taking three math classes right now, but I think there's a good chance I'll drop the impossibly tough Advanced Algebra that TheDad's daughter dropped, as well, resulting in two math classes and two non-math. I would say that this is a pretty light schedule compared to most people I know here - but then, there are a lot of impossibly smart people at the program, as well. The classes are very comparable overall and many are more difficult than the classes at my home university.</p>
<p>Budapest is a very walkable city - so even though the metro closes down at 11, it is relatively safe (especially if you walk with someone) to walk home, and the walk is never too far (almost all the BSM apartments are very central, and many of the homestays aren't too bad, either). Budapest is a gorgeous city and a great place to be for the semester - and I decided today that I'll head to Prague this weekend, so travel is pretty easy. If you have any questions about the program, feel free to contact me as well :)</p>
<p>P.S. I'm definitely an algebra person, not a combinatorics and analysis person, and there are still definitely plenty of advanced course offerings. (Advanced Algebra, Galois Theory, Character Theory of Finite Groups, etc.)</p>