Math department perspectives from math majors

Hi there - I’m a prospective transfer student intending to major in mathematics (pure). I think it’s the case that USC’s math department leans applied, but I just wanted to get a better sense of the department and major, but specifically from students who have taken upper-division courses.

A lot of the time it’s hard to get high-signal anecdotes about math courses and professors because when you ask about math courses generally, you’ll get inundated by disgruntled CS/eng/science grads who had to take calculus and linear algebra in poorly ventilated lecture halls with 500 other students and wanted nothing more than to be done with it. Which really tells me essentially nothing about the department - that’s always going to be the case for lower-division bottleneck prerequisites.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s taken any of the core major courses like analysis/abstract algebra or beyond. What’s the workload like? Are the professors accessible/friendly? Recommend/don’t recommend?

Thanks

Based on some of your concerns, you also may want to consider math departments that are not tightly connected to applied math or engineering programs. This site offers some examples:

Thanks, will review this.

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Before I give a speck of advice…why are you transferring, what year are you in college, and where are you transferring from?