<p>I need some advice for a friend who is considering graduate school. </p>
<p>Well they earned a 3.06 cumulative GPA at a community college after having spent three years there. Then, they earned a 4.0 after transferring at their four year university. They got a perfect score for math on the general gre and 90 something percentile for the subject test. They have no research experience however. Depending on what kind of schools that might accept him he might choose to go to law school instead with a 170' last score. What are realistic school choices for him?</p>
<p>You didn’t really specify, but I will assume that your friend is interested in PhD programs in pure math. (Yes, that makes a difference.) Also, it bugs the crap out of me to refer to a single person as “they.” Since the generic graduate applicant in math is male, I will use male pronouns instead. </p>
<p>Most graduate school applicants in math have no research experience. Princeton or Stanford might care, but most gradate programs won’t. I don’t see his community college GPA being a big obstacle either, since math programs don’t seem to care much about lower-division coursework or non-math courses. Here is what will matter:</p>
<ul>
<li>His math subject GRE. A 90th percentile score will be sufficient for all cut-offs out there. </li>
<li>Whether he has taken any graduate-level courses as an undergraduate. Virtually all successful applicants to the top 10 PhD programs have. Some graduate programs are even structured assuming that their entering students are done with foundational graduate-level coursework and ready to specialize.</li>
<li>How rigorously taught his math courses were. I’ve had several graduate programs ask me for syllabi, instructor and textbook information of my upper-level courses. </li>
<li>If he wants to go to a tippy top graduate program, it will matter whether his references are known to the admissions committee. Professors in the top departments seem to swap their students for grad school. </li>
<li>And of course it will matter what his references are saying. A friend of mine graduated with a near-perfect GPA from an Ivy, with several publications and almost a dozen graduate courses under his belt. He got rejected almost everywhere he applied (mostly top 20 programs) because one of his letters said, “He’s good but not quite as strong as our other graduate applicants.” </li>
</ul>
<p>In short: I have no idea which graduate programs your friend might get accepted to. Can he apply both to graduate programs in math and to law school and decide after he has all admission offers on the table?</p>