<p>I'm starting to think about going to grad school for math. I currently a junior, but I am worried that I messed up my freshmen year and have probably ruined my chances of getting into a good grad school.</p>
<p>My freshmen year I got a bunch of Cs and my gpa is currently a 3.29. I did really well last year and got a 3.6 and a 3.83 second semester. So, there is definitely a strong upward trend, but what I am more worried about is my major gpa.</p>
<p>Two of the classes I got Cs in my freshmen year were honors calculus. I got a C- first semester and a C+ second semester. This puts my major gpa around 3.14. I calculated my major gpa without these two classes and it as a 3.6. </p>
<p>I really changed my ways last year, and ended up getting pretty good grades it some difficult math classes, such as analysis, topology, and multivariate calculus. </p>
<p>Will math grad schools care that much about my grades in freshmen calculus? I understand that having done poorly in them isn't going to help, but will it hurt a lot? </p>
<p>I am also trying to get more involved with the math department and am currently doing a reading course in differential topology with a professor. I hope to be able to turn this into an honors thesis. I applied for a bunch of REUs last summer, but didn't get accepted to a single one. I am most definitely going to try again this year. </p>
<p>I think my dream school is a school like Columbia, which appears to have a very active topology group, although I would be equally as happy to get into a school like Northwestern, Rutgers or SUNY Stony Brook, which are all closer to the end of the top 25 list of usnews math grad school rankings.</p>
<p>I think if you take the GRE-Math (different from the Q section of the GRE) and score high enough it will show you have learned from you slow start in Calc I and II. You still have a decent GPA regardless of the C’s.</p>
<p>Plus you do have that upward trend going for you in Calc classes, that is an indication that you have a good learning curve.</p>
<p>The other thing I have been considering is mathematical physics. I’m working on a physics minor, and my physics grades are much much better. I have gotten an A in every physics class I’ve taken so far except freshmen mechanics which I got a C+ in. </p>
<p>I’m not completely sure if I’d be applying to such programs for the right reasons though. The main reason I’ve been considering it is because my chances of getting in somewhere would probably be better. I don’t actually know anything about mathematical physics. </p>
<p>I find physics to be somewhat frustrating. In my opinion much of the physics I have done is just a bunch of computational math junk, which I absolutely hate. I am taking a classical mechanics course right now, and get really frustrated when I have to solve these crazy complicated polynomials, or some differential equation, or find the max and min of some crazy function. I think the theory behind physics and deriving equations for different types of systems to be interesting, but solving them is something I hate doing.</p>
<p>Mathematical physics is often considered a branch of mathematics and housed on the math departments. Many universities would have you apply to the regular math PhD program to study mathematical physics. If your main objective is to increase your odds for admission, would you only apply to stand-alone mathematical physics PhD programs or mathematical physics programs housed in physics departments?</p>
<p>Well, I don’t think I would only apply to them. I would probably apply to one or two stand-alone mathematical physics PhD programs, one or two mathematical physics programs in physics departments, and then maybe one or two top pure math programs, and then i guess 2 - 4 “match” schools. </p>
<p>I think 8 to 10 grad schools seems like a reasonable number. Right? That was around the number of schools I applied to for undergrad.</p>