<p>Hi everyone. I will be graduating in three years if i graduate in spring2008, that is next year. I am very much determined to graduate early but still sometimes I feel like its not a good idea. If I stay for one more year I can take other classes in unrelated fields.. but I will have done almost all the higher level math courses offered here.. and there is no way I can take graduate courses. Here are my possible stats that I will have by the time I apply:</p>
<p>overall GPA: 3.9
Math GPA 4.0
GRE: >750M, 500-600V, >750 math subject
Recommendations:a couple of good ones.
research: two summers with professors in my college, but in unrelated fields.
attempting for honor but wont have thesis paper when i apply.
p.s. I am graduating from a first tyre liberal arts college.</p>
<p>So how are my chances and what sort of schools should i consider(I am thinking of Uni of IL, Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, Michigan, Colorado-boulder, MIT, Columbia, UChicago)? Does the low verbal score in GRE matter for math applicants?</p>
<p>Good GPA, low general GRE math score, not-too-bad GRE subject score. If your recommendations are good, that's a plus, though it's too bad that you haven't published. What field are you in?</p>
<p>By the way, why can't you take any grad courses?</p>
<p>what do u mean by what field? i m a math major and i did research with professors of some other field.</p>
<p>i cant take graduate courses because they are not offered in my school and due to some reasons its impossible for me to take classes at some other university.</p>
<p>lado, your academic records are competitive for a top-tier PhD program. Since most PhD applications won't due until the end of year, you should make good use of the remaining time focus on the following:
1. Beef up your research exposure/experience (getting your thesis published will be great!)
2. Gather solid recommendation (best by start talking to professors about your PhD plans and LISTEN to them!!)
3. Consider taking another shot at your GRE, especially the verbal.</p>
<p>Howdy again. I pretty much agree with what dallas808 said (except on the last point, in that I doubt that a program would deny someone acceptance based on a 500--600 verbal score). By what field, I meant the area of math that you had concentrated on (say, algebra or analysis or combinatorics or geometry or dynamical systems or ...). It's OK if you haven't concentrated on one field yet (maybe that's even good; people like Erdos often are notable in that their contributions span many fields). Good luck --- I think that you have a pretty good shot at the better and best programs. I'd suggest e-mailing the admissions offices of the schools you're interested in --- when I was a freshman (last year), I e-mailed Cambridge's math department to ask about whether they could give me any advice on my chances and on how I should approach my undergrad time; one of the math professors gave me a lot of good advice.</p>
<p>im not sure i can agree with the above advice that you have a pretty good shot at the top schools on your list. without a great deal of relevant research and a good, but not great, subject score... i just cant see mit, berkeley, chicago, columbia or michigan accepting you. the competition for spots at that level is simply intense.</p>
<p>however, as is, i do think you have a decent shot at some top 20ish schools, especially those with larger enrollments (like illinois).</p>
<p>a few suggestions/recommendations:
1) study, study, study for the gre subject test. make sure you score above the 80th percentile and gun for the 90th. a great score here will really help;
2) think about doing a program such as this one your senior year: <a href="http://www.math.psu.edu/mass/%5B/url%5D">http://www.math.psu.edu/mass/</a> to strengthen your applications;
2a) alternatively, graduate in three years and spend a fourth beefing up your resume at a larger institution. this is the route i took and my applications this year were much stronger than they would have been had i applied as a senior;
3) start making contacts with professors/departments in which you are interested before fall of your senior year. familiarity is the difference on the margin;
4) find a way to do SOME kind of meaningful mathematics research before you submit your applications. right now your grades and projected gres will get you into the 'maybe' piles at top ten schools, but without research you wont get any further than that;<br>
5) try to spend some time with a professor who has some recognition in the mathematics community. mathematics recommendations can only be as good as those doing the recommending;
6) start reading mathematics independently as most schools will ask for books youve read. having a few in addition to required texts will show motivation;
6) to your gre verbal concern, spend a couple hours sometime in the week before the exam going over the barrons word list. nothing more. shoot for a 600 and dont worry about getting anything higher. only consider retaking if you come out below 500.</p>
<p>For what it is worth I am a chemistry major and I have gotten in to every single top graduate school I applied to with mediocre gre scores (690m,510v,5.0w,65% percentile chemistry) but I was let in because I did tremendous research and will get published a few times before graduating. (I go to Tufts, so a top tier liberal arts college as well.) I think schools care about your research first and foremost.</p>
<p>I graduated from NYU after only three years, and I did fairly well in graduate school admissions. I was rejected from Columbia, Harvard and MIT, and I was accepted to Brown, Rutgers, Stony Brook, and UCLA (I withdrew applications from CUNY, Lehigh, and UCSD). I honestly don't think I would have gotten into Harvard or MIT had I stayed for a fourth year, unless I had spent most of it doing research and getting a fantastic letter of recommendation. I may have gotten into Columbia with a fourth year, but I'll never know.</p>
<p>What I can tell you is that my stats were pretty similar to yours, with a few notable exceptions. I had a 730 on the subject test (77th %ile), 800M and 560V on the general test (a 500-600V score should never hurt your chances of admission for math PhD programs), a 3.9 GPA, and a 3.92 or so math GPA. I participated in a math REU, and at the time of application we had only submitted our paper to a journal - it was just now accepted, and so that wasn't considered at the time. And although I haven't seen my letters of recommendation, I am assuming they were pretty wonderful.</p>
<p>One of the big differences is that I was able to take five graduate courses while an undergrad. I was told by the director of admissions from one of the schools I was admitted to that they prefer students who have research experience, they prefer students who have scored at least 650 or 700 on the GRE subject test, and they prefer students who have taken graduate courses. Of course it's not going to hurt you too much, since you can't take graduate courses at your school. But it's certainly not going to help.</p>
<p>I don't know how much help this has been, but to sum it up, you've got at least an okay chance at some of the lower schools on your list (which are still WONDERFUL schools), but you don't have good chances at the really top-notch schools (Berkeley, MIT, Columbia maybe). Taking a year off could potentially help boost your chances across the board, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's worth it. Depends on you.</p>
<p>emengee,
thanks for ur such an encouraging comment.. it has really made me feel happy and positive. since i wont be able to take graduate courses at any cost, can u elaborate a bit more on the use of taking graduate courses. do most of the competetive applicants take graduate courses before graduating from college? can u explain this more:"Of course it's not going to hurt you too much, since you can't take graduate courses at your school. But it's certainly not going to help."
and about the research, if i do the reasearch with my professor (and not with with some well known institutions like REU) how do I make it count for admission? I mean do I just add a line about the reasearch in my resume or write a seperate essay or leave it upto the professor to mention it on his/her recommendation?</p>
<p>also can you exactly name few good universities(with good stipend obviously) that you think are "safety" for me?</p>
<p>Most applicants to these top universities will have some graduate coursework under their belts before graduating from their undergrad institutions. In fact, I visited one school where I was told that they generally do not admit students who have not taken at least one graduate course if their school offers graduate courses. So being in a position where you do not have graduate courses at your school shouldn't hurt you as much as it would a student who <i>does</i> have graduate courses at their school but decided not to take them. In other words, if you have taken the most intense and rigorous mathematics courses your school offers, the graduate programs should recognize that.</p>
<p>As far as research goes, I personally had my research experience listed on my r</p>
<p>Of course, the best way to show that you've done research is to publish. I've heard people say that most students don't publish, so you shouldn't worry if you don't. I disagree, to some extent, with this sort of statement, when it's made about people in math or in the sciences. I'm publishing two papers in Elsevier (as an equal coauthor, with a professor) after having worked on a problem for a year and a bit; unless I'm missing something pretty big, I'd guess that a smart student can certainly publish at least one paper after four years in school.</p>
<p>I think when people say that "No one in undergrad publishes anyways" they are talking more specifically about humanities. It's really hard to get published in almost any humanities field as an undergraduate student.</p>
<p>On the subject of publishing, do not take my word as Gospel. i only know that in my field (humanities) getting anything published as an undergrad is fairly hard. I don't know how it works in the hard sciences.</p>
<p>Indeed. Getting a good work published is incredibly difficult in many fields. But guess what keeps PhD students in top programs working tirelessly everyday. Most, if not all, programs will give their first preference to a candidate who is familar and successful with the grueling process of research and publication. So, there more a candidate can hit the ground running on day 1 and "survive", the better his or her admission chance is. </p>
<p>The other reason for getting into undergrad research earlier on is to build a <em>working</em> relationship with your professor(s) so they can write detailed personal account on how you would succeed as a graduate student (and future scholar). This type of recommendation letter usually goes a long way getting you in than those few lines in your resume.</p>
<p>Getting published as an undergraduate isn't as common as some people on this board would like you to believe. I participated in an REU between my junior and senior years of undergrad, and we had some nontrivial results. After submitting an article to a journal, we finally found out last week that it has been accepted. If things happen quickly, it MIGHT appear in print two years after the REU took place. So it's important to note that if you want to have a publication by the time you're applying to graduate school, you'll pretty much need to have done research, have come up with a nontrivial result, and have submitted it for publication by the beginning of your junior year. It often takes six months to a year or even longer for articles to be refereed, and so you really have to be on the ball during the first half of college to get published. This isn't true of very many students, and so anyone claiming that it's important to get published as an undergraduate is full of ****. At least, in math. I would assume it's similar in the sciences, but please correct me if I'm wrong.</p>
<p>Furthermore, when I told some of my friends at school that I'm going to be published, most of their reactions were, "Wow, even I'm not published yet." One of these friends is a third year student, and one is a fifth year student who's graduating this year and choosing between post-doc offers for next year, as well as some possible tenure-track positions after the post-doc. If these advanced graduate students (in a top-20 program) aren't even published yet, then it's absurd to suggest that anyone would expect an undergraduate to be published.</p>
<p>Now, of course dallas808 is correct in that schools will most likely grab up any published candidates before others (assuming there's nothing fishy there - we're talking articles in real journals with real results), and anyone who has the opportunity to be published should jump on it; however, nobody should be disappointed in themselves for not being published as an undergraduate, and nobody should have that as a primary goal while being an undergraduate (if anything at all, it should be secondary to getting the research experience and getting the chance to get to know a professor well).</p>
<p>I went to a "getting into grad school" talk when I was a junior, and the faculty members (in neuroscience at MIT) said about 5% of their applicant pool had published by application time.</p>
<p>Publication can really help (I was published as an undergrad, and it was something all of my interviewers wanted to talk about), but it's not necessary, and the majority of accepted applicants (in the biological sciences) are not published.</p>
<p>Mollibatmit would know WAY more about publishing in the hard sciences than I would, obviously, but I get the feeling that, like she said, getting published as an undergrad really is quite rare. I'm sure that if you DO get published it would look grat on an application, but don't go into the application process thinking that everyone else your up against has published loads of work.</p>
<p>Hmm, interesting. Maybe it's easier to get published in applied math and math than in other areas --- most of the junior and senior undergraduates that I've worked with have published at least one paper.</p>