I’m a prospective student applying to Yale from India for admissions to the class of 2020. Over the past few months, I have been making my college list and I came across Yale. I absolutely fell in love with Yale. I love almost everything about it (although my top choice is a certain college in Cambridge) and I would feel really grateful to attend it (that is, if at all I get the opportunity to make that decision).
I’m a prospective math + economics/classics major and although I am dead set on math, I’m not so sure about economics and classics. Although, if given a choice, I will definitely try to double major.
The thing is, I really do not have a lot of knowledge about math and economics at Yale. It would be great if someone could tell me about this (especially a current student or an alumni). I would like to know more about the research opportunities and internship opportunities.
I would really appreciate any help. Thank you in advance
Hi, Math and Econ at Yale is a very hard major–one of the hardest. The people who choose this major are super super bright students. The psets are very time consuming but if it’s what you like, this is a highly useful and rewarding major. If you don’t have a great math background, I would recommend starting off with Econ first and then deciding if you want to do Math and Econ. There are tons of internship and research opportunities with Math and Econ. That shouldn’t be a worry–there’s always a lot to do.
I also don’t recommend double majoring–it will be very hard to choose other classes and there are soooo many cool classes you wouldn’t want to miss out on.
You should also know that there is no double-majoring at Harvard.
At Harvard you can major in Applied Math, which has an Ec track for taking Ec classes. That would be equivalent to the combined (not double) Math-Econ major at Yale.
You can take a Classics minor at Harvard (“Secondary Field”), but not an additional major.
@ElMimino That list was not in order of my preferences (even if I might have stated it :-p ) I believe that at an undergrad level, a better college environment will help me more than a slight difference in the strength of the math programs. Yale is high up on my list and if at all I do get in, I would love to go there if everything works out fine. Obviously, there are one or two schools that I would choose over Yale, still, the probability of me getting into any of them is very less.
@4thfloor Although my top choice is a certain college in Cambridge (You guessed it right ) this question pertains to Yale. I know that one cannot double major at Harvard. I will most probably concentrate in Applied Math if at all I go there.
@sunshine02 Thank you for your reply. I talked to a Yale alumni over the past few weeks and he said the exact same things to me. I will drop the idea of double majoring but I will make sure to take classes that interest me. I’ll major in math then, I guess. Can you shed some more light on what opportunities are available to a math major at Yale and also the life of a math major at Yale (in terms of the bond between the other math majors, the lifestyle that they lead; especially now that you have mentioned that Psets are hard and they must be spending quite a lot of time on it)? I would appreciate it if you could help me out with this either here or through PM.
I have limited knowledge based on only one visit, but Yale seems to be as good a place as similar univerisites to study math. Very few people do the major, but those who do are very bright and committed to it. Most of the advanced freshmen take Math 230, which helps build more of a community for math majors. People tend to colloborate on psets, and the psets can be very time-consuming. Most of the people I talked to seemed happy with the major, especially the fact that it is geared towards freshmen who already have significant mathematical experience coming in.
+1 to @Fineman. Although my son is not a math major (he’s CS) and didn’t have the math background of many of his classmates, he made good friends in Math 230 that have lasted well beyond the class. As always, Yale students are more collaborative than selfish with psets. Fwiw, he wouldn’t ordinarily be proud of a B+, but he said that he spent as many hours on 230 as the rest of his classes combined, he wasn’t far from an A, and he is convinced that it was well worth it.
For that other university you’re interested in, Math 55 might be a bit tougher.
Not that this is definitive by any means, but it’s interesting to compare the size of the undergraduate math community at Yale with that of some of its peers. In 2014, Yale awarded a grand total of 37 primary bachelor’s degrees in math or math-related majors (including statistics, econ & math, math & physics, math & philosophy, CS & math), out of a class of about 1,300. So about 2.8% of the students.
Harvard, with about 1,700 students, awarded 130 math degrees (7.6%). Columbia had 81 math or statistics primary degrees and 87 primary degrees in operations research (a very math-y major in its engineering program), representing over 8% of its class. The University of Chicago, which is about the same size as Yale, awarded 116 math or statistics primary degrees (8.6%). (Chicago, unlike the other colleges, makes public a quarterly census of its students’ declared majors. At the end of winter quarter 2015, there were 320 students with declared math or math-related majors, out of a total of just over 3,400 students with declared majors.) Princeton, also about the same size as Yale, awarded 55 primary math degrees, and also 52 primary degrees in operations research . Williams, whose student body is 40% the size of Yale’s, had twice as many straight math majors – 26-13. (And of course I am not even talking about MIT, Mudd, or Caltech.)
The point being that Yale is apparently not a place where people who are really into math at the undergraduate level tend to congregate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there, or that it shouldn’t be a high choice, or that you can’t get a good math education there, but it does mean that to get the wonderful things Yale offers you give up something in terms of critical mass and math community vibrancy. There’s a lot more math in the air at some other, otherwise pretty similar colleges.
I agree with JHS. I just graduated with a Statistics major, and it is true that there are very few students at Yale who pursue math-related majors. The departments are correspondingly small, and towards the end, I probably knew almost all of the undergrads in my department and a fair few grad students too. People are very friendly and collaborative, and you typically work on psets in a group. Professors are also very accessible through their office hours.
Math and econ is a difficult major, but it is looked upon very favorably by employers. I think that the internship/employment prospects are better than if you major in econ; I’m not sure, but they’re probably on par with majoring in math or applied math. A lot of math and econ majors end up in finance (and especially trading, I think, although sometimes people go into investment banking), but I’ve also met people who choose math and econ because they are interested in econometrics. The class that tends to be a stumbling block for a lot of prospective math and econ majors is ECON 135, the first of two required econometrics courses in the major. People also find analysis challenging.
It’s easier to do any of the math-related majors if you come in with a strong math background (i.e. having completed multivariable calculus and ready to take Math 230; I would especially encourage you to get some exposure to writing proofs), but it’s definitely possible to come into Yale without this type of background and still pull off a math-heavy program.
Finally, if you’re interested in the math and econ major, then you should maybe also consider the Economics track within the Applied Math major. The pure math major might be too theoretical for your tastes, but you can also look into it.
Make sure you grasp the probabilities before using your early leverage on a school like Yale, Harvard or Stanford.
Unless I’m reading their site wrong - http://www.hio.harvard.edu/statistics - Harvard College only admits about five kids from India each year. What is the applicant pool like from India? How many? Hundreds? Thousands? How accomplished is the pool?
I’ve seen clips of Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, say that Harvard actively identifies and pursues preternatural scholars from select international math, music and science competitions. Are you one of those kids? Are you one of the very tippy-top students in India who Harvard, Yale or Stanford is actively pursuing?
I bring this up because if you apply SCEA to HYP or Stanford you may be missing a small window of opportunity at other top American colleges and universities like Wesleyan, Mudd, Middlebury etc.
As you may or may not know, many top American schools admit upwards to half of their class from 1/10th of their applicant pool in the early rounds; and this fractional early applicant pool is not overwhelmed with top students from Asia - those students will flood the pool later in the regular decision round.
@arwarw I completely understand the risk of not being able to leverage the early admissions advantage by not applying to universities that accept more students. I am not keen on doing ED. Mudd is already on my list and I’m also considering Middlebury.
That being said, quite a lot of people apply to colleges in the US from India. I wouldn’t be far off the actual number if I estimate it to be around 5 to 6 thousand. But, I believe that only 200 to 300 stand a good chance of getting into a top college. Out of that, maybe 30 to 50 stand a really good chance at HYPSM and the likes. Yes, only 4 or 5 (this year it was 5) people get admissions at these colleges every year, but that is a chance I’m willing to take.
I’ll PM what I have actually done so that you can judge for yourself. I don’t want to reveal my identity on this site.
@mumbai98 How do you figure? I would have thought there would have been many more competitive applicants just from the city of Mumbai alone.
There are well over a 100,000 Indian Student Visa’s active in the US right now. I had read that in 2011 Brown had over 300 applicants from India , and the amount was growing at an astonishing 20%/year. I would think (because of it’s brand popularity) Harvard would have many more applicants than Brown.
@arwarw The 100,000 Visa applicants include grad and PhD students as well (which there are quite a lot of). 300 applicants to Brown from India and a slightly higher number for Harvard isn’t something that is surprising given our propensity for chasing brand value over anything else. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Harvard was on the list of around 70 - 80% of all the applicants. Another major reason is that Harvard is need blind. Due to the weak value of rupee, many people cannot afford the entire cost. So seeking aid is a given.
I wouldn’t say that that there are around 4 to 5 thousand applicants for undergraduate studies from Mumbai alone, but around 1 thousand would be somewhat likely. Again, 5 - 6 thousand was a rough estimate. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were around 10,000. 5 - 6 thousand was just a safe bet.
^So, just from Mumbai alone that would mean 70% x 1,000 applicants = 700 Harvard applicants.
Based on Brown’s numbers I would have guessed about 1,000 applying to Harvard College from ALL of India - but even at half that, it means 500 students from India applying for just 5 spots.
It’s too bad about the brand thing in China and India (and everywhere else I suppose). I’m sure Harvard is fantastic, but is the intrinsic undergrad experience that much worse at colleges like Pomona, Williams, Deep Springs, Swarthmore etc…? I get the financial aid thing, but some of those other colleges also offer aid, and I’m guessing there are some full-pay Chinese and Indians applying.
@arwarw Yes, there is a lot of competition in India. But like I said, many people who apply there aren’t competitive in the first place (bad grades, sub 2000 SATs, etc) but apply just because they can. Still, the number of people competing for the 5 odd spots is too high.
No problems. I’m glad that I could answer a few of your questions.
) this question pertains to Yale. I know that one cannot double major at Harvard. I will most probably concentrate in Applied Math if at all I go there.