MIT vs Trinity College, Cambridge for maths (revisited question)

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>Hello, I am a very confused student.
I do love math but I am not yet sure if I want to pursue a math major at university.
I am sure I do not enjoy anything else as I do enjoy mathematics but still, I feel I would like to have a broader education or a free year to decide about my major later. Is it possible at Cambridge to change your major. I have read that 10% of math majors do change, but is this truly feasible?
My dilemma is MIT vs Trinity College, Cambridge.
I have heart that the math program at cambridge is very rigorous and math oriented and those who graduate end up knowing pretty cool math.
What is the case with MIT, is the program rigorous? Do students get disoriented with all the GIRs?
Also, I know that life at mit and people at mit are open to international students and fun to be around? Has anyone experienced the atmosphere at cambridge? Is it easy to make friends at cambridge?
At MIT you get to do research through UROP, there is no such thing for Cambridge, (I am mistaken?) But, you get to learn how to do math, which might be more important.</p>

<p>If you have anything to add or clarify please do so.
I have to say that I feel like at Home in both places, that I have visited and loved. Also, that I have many friends going to MIT.</p>

<p>Thank you!</p>

<p>PS. I made a new thread on the question because I felt it was different from the previous ones. (If I did a mistake, I am sorry - I am a new member! :))</p>

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<p>I don’t think you can change major in Cambridge, but I’ll still pick Trinity. Hah.</p>

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This would definitely be a reason to think heavily about MIT – freshmen do not choose a major until late in second semester, and it’s not even required to choose a major at that point. </p>

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What do you mean by “disoriented”?</p>

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<p>Welcome!</p>

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<p>Yes. MIT’s curriculum is designed such that you’re working on GIRs your first year, and after that you work on your major. Making a change midway through sophomore year tends to work for many majors. Sometimes the change is made easier by being in an already similar field. Math at MIT is particularly flexible for an MIT major.</p>

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<p>The math program here is as rigorous as you want it to be, depending on which track you choose. You can take easier classes, or you can spend your time in the most rigorous graduate-level courses you can find. It’s up to you :slight_smile: Undergraduates are by no means limited to undergraduate classes.</p>

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<p>Not sure what you mean by disoriented. If you mean, do people find the requirements confusing at first, yes. If you mean, it distracts you from your overall goal of getting into your major, not really.</p>

<p>Also, are any of your questions asking about Cambridge (USA), or are they about Cambridge (UK)? I can’t tell, but I can answer Cambridge (USA) ones.</p>

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<p>I don’t have anything to add to your actual questions, but I would like to point out that there’s a nonzero number of math students who have in fact attended both as undergraduates, through the [Cambridge-MIT</a> Exchange](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/cmi/ue/]Cambridge-MIT”>http://web.mit.edu/cmi/ue/) program. Surely, they will be in a good position to judge the relative merits of the programs. so perhaps you could somehow get hold of some e-mail addresses and ask them?</p>

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<p>This really is a question of comparing apples to oranges. Trinity has a great Mathematics program, and is stunning to live in, but if you go to Cambridge, you will be very unlikely to take any subject outside of the mathematics department for three years. Cambridge does not offer any form of “liberal arts” education. Rather it is a deep dive into a single subject for three years. </p>

<p>As such, you will probably do more math in 3 years in Trinity than you will do in 4 years at MIT (MIT is as rigouous as you make it and the Math major at MIT is one of the most open on campus). That might be a good thing, it might not. I found the non-major courses that I took at MIT to be extremely helpful in my professional life. </p>

<p>There is a huge difference between writing a long mathematics paper and writing a non-math paper, and the skills in rhetoric and in constructing an argument to be understood by non-technical people (such as management at most firms, or grant awarding bodies) are IMHO skills best learned outside of the mathematics department.</p>

<p>For me personally, I’m very glad I went to MIT. In high school, I was president of the math club and captain of the math team (yep, full-on geek). I went to MIT certain that I wanted to study pure mathematics. Then I took 18.100 Analysis I, my first pure mathematics course (and at the time the most dropped course per capita at the Institute). We spent two weeks, and 8 pages of Greek letters proving the existence of the rational numbers (fractions). I now have a little girl. From the time she was two years old, she had no problems with instructions like “You can eat half of that cookie.” I had real problems spending two weeks proving the existance of something that I was willing to accept as a primitive at age 2. I resolved immediately that pure mathematics involved too much naval gazing and mental masturbation for my taste and I resolved to change my major, which was no trouble at MIT. I filled in the form, and I shifted focus. I still enjoy math very much, but I am confident that I had made the right choice.</p>

<p>At Cambridge however, to change my major I would most likely have been forced to withdraw from the school, and then to reapply the following year to my new department. For me as a math major, I would have been better off to go to MIT for my undergraduate education, and then to pursue a Masters at Cambridge, once I was ready for the deep dive, but your mileage may very much vary.</p>

<p>Both schools are excellent, but both are very, very, very different. By the way, the Trinity May ball is 2011, so if you go to Trinity, you will experience a May ball in your final year, which I think it the best way to do it.</p>

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<p>Senior May Ball at Trinity: Punting down the Cam while eating strawberries and drinking champagne, dressed in formal wear.</p>

<p>Senior celebration at MIT: Skydiving from an airplane. (There’s a ball at MIT also, but it doesn’t include any white tents alongside the Cam…)</p>

<p>Just thought I’d highlight some additional differences. :-)</p>

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<p>Good to hear that “Trinity have a stunning maths program”, previously I thought that colleges DO NOT have programs :smiley: I know everyone is sooo obsessed with college memberships, but it’s truly not that important - ahh, well, it’s surely a fantastic thing to be in the richest Oxbridge college, but there are no differences between the education provided by the colleges - partially because there is just one maths department in Cambridge, to which all fellows belong to… Trinity is a stunning college anyaway :slight_smile: And, contrary to Mikalye, Trinity have annual may balls…although cant see the point in this, going to a may ball depends on your wallet, and not college membership. Everyone is free to go to may balls, if they have the money…</p>

<p>But that’s true, apples and oranges, 3 year vs 4, but both are excellent institutions. But you can do a BA and an MPhil in 4 years, in Cambridge - but the courses are shorter because you will just learn maths, and maths only… If you’re not sure what you want to do, then the US model could be better for you, perhaps.</p>

<p>CalAlum: I’m missing the drunk girls from the picture :D</p>

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<p>@molliebatmit: the fact about choosing a major in the second year is a definite plus of MIT for me. by disoriented, I meant that you get lost with all the other requirements and you don’t have the time to go in depth in your major (which apparently you have as PiperXP pointed out)
@PiperXP: I did not know that you are allowed to take graduate courses as well, which is quite interesting. also, I was talking about Cambridge (UK)
@Isthmus: I have read about this program and I will try to contact some students if possible
@Mikalye: I found your post quite helpful, and I feel like I want to explore a bit more all sciences and then concentrate on mathematics. Out of curiosity, where did you major in? Also I had no idea about the Trinity May Ball, that must be fun.
@CalAlum: Of course skydiving seems a bit more cool (:D)
@GeraldM: I agree that the US model might be better for me.</p>

<p>Also, does anyone know if you can go to Grad school at MIT if you are an undergrad there?</p>

<p>p.s. thank you all for your posts</p>

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<p>@ confused,</p>

<p>No reason you can’t go to MIT for grad school if you were an undergrad. Usually, however, this is not recommended for the science students (this includes math). There is no rule that prevents you from applying, or getting in, but this is still the general MIT stance. For engineers, on the contrary, there is no stigma against doing undergrad and grad at MIT.</p>

<p>I don’t know if MIT has any combined BS/MS or BS/PhD programs, but you can go to mit.edu and look at the math dept to see.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the response. I have did find a combined programme for math in MIT’s site. Maybe there is such a programme for engineering only.
A question I have is where do mit undergrads go after graduation? I know that getting a high GPA at MIT is hard. Is this a drawback when they try to get into a good grad. school?</p>

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<p>In Maths? Princeton, maybe. There are many excellent maths departments in the US, but if you graduate from MIT (or from Cam), there’s obviously no way to go to a weaker uni’s grad school. But doing a BA at MIT, and then going to Princeton to grad schools seems a good choice, although Princeton is primary an undergrad institution…btw, you did not apply to Princeton? If somebody interested in maths, and able to get into MIT and Cambridge, it seems logical…</p>

<p>But it could be an other excellent choice, to do a masters (MPhil) in Cambridge, before doing a PhD. One year, and because of the ties between Cambridge and MIT, it’s surely a bit easier to receive scholarships, and it will definitely boost your CV, as the Cambridge maths department is in the World Top 5. And then you can do a PhD in the states.</p>

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It depends on the field. Overall, the most common grad school destination of MIT undergrads is MIT itself, but the next highest schools are Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech, etc. </p>

<p>You can see more statistics [url=<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation09.pdf]here[/url”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation09.pdf]here[/url</a>].</p>

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<p>If you go to MIT, you will have to stop referring to mathematics as “maths”. It is either “math” or “mathematics.”</p>

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<p>… plenty of foreign students say “maths”. It’s unusual for a US student to say, sure, but it’s not as though it’s misunderstood.</p>

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<p>Yes, I’ve decided it’s time for them to stop.</p>

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<p>I agree with Mikalye. The two styles are insanely different. I would also add that some who went to Cambridge seem to find their educations turned out too narrow even within mathematics, because in 3 years, if you do not go a bit narrow, you may never get anywhere substantial. On the other hand, it is perfect for those who know what they want…[EDIT] and do not care about breadth (note some mathematical research involves considerable breadth, while other stuff is narrow)</p>

<p>One of the nice things about MIT is that its math program is huge, so you will have people in various areas. However, if your area is logic, I would say it may not be the ideal school.</p>

<p>@collegealum, I feel ‘maths’ sounds nice!</p>

<p>Also,</p>

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<p>as a comment, I think many mathematicians do not care about defining fundamental things that they already know about. You take a lot onfaith, although the point is someone has checked it.</p>

<p>I think the reason you make elaborate constructions is that they give clean ways of looking at things, but in the end people take the courses and check only the details they care to. Of course, this process is not interesting to everyone, and it does involve ‘naval gazing’</p>

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<p>It makes you sound like you have a speech impediment.</p>

<p>Girls don’t go for that, son.</p>

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<p>@collegealum314 - Your grumpiness doesn’t give you the privilege of deciding how foreign students should speak at MIT.</p>

<p>And I totally go for British people saying “maths”, so you’re also wrong.</p>

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<p>As is obvious from my handle, I am a class of 2006 graduate of the MIT mathematics department (UG).</p>

<p>From my experience, it is unusual for an MIT math undergraduate to to be accepted into MIT’s math Ph.D. program. I only saw a handful of students do it each year. It isn’t that MIT feels its undergraduates are ill prepared for the graduate program, or that MIT does not “want” them. As I understand it, the rational is a relatively common one among certain departments (and not only at MIT): The faculty wants their graduates, by and large, to go off and experience mathematics under a different regime, so to speak. They feel that a differnt perspective and culture of mathematics is the best way for their students to grow as mathematicians.</p>

<p>I think the practice is justified. I woud wager that not <em>some</em> but <em>most</em> MIT mathematics undergraduates who have serious aspirations of pursuing math at a graduate level already have significant exposure to both MIT’s graduate curriculum in their field as well as its research activities by the time they graduate. You can never run out of things to learn at MIT, but I do think it is fair to say that going elsewhere for graduate school exposes MIT math grads to a greater variety of genuinely “new” experiences.</p>

<p>From my exposure, it seems that the students who were selected to continue on into MIT’s Ph.D. program were not selected for being the “best” undergraduates. Some of the most brilliant students that I knew went elsewhere and were encouraged to do so. The ones who stayed were generally students who had strong promise but, more importantly, had research interests that were very well aligned with their desired advisors’. I should go further to say that in perhaps <em>all</em> cases, these students had existing, strong research ties to their advisors (existing joint papers, projects, etc.). It seems that the math department allowed students to stay only if MIT was fairly conclusively <em>the</em> best place in the world for them to carry on with their existing research.</p>

<p>So, to get to my point: If you want to do a Ph.D. in math at MIT, I would recommend going elsewhere for undergrad…simply because doing “your best” is not really the formula for transitioning from MIT UG to MIT G (in math). And, you certainly wouldn’t want to keep your interests from developing naturally such that you would be a strong candidate for the Ph.D. program. Let your mathematical interests guide you, not your graduate school aspirations.</p>

<p>This is just my two cents from experience. And, lest people get the wrong impression, this is certainly not the way that most MIT departments operate. Not withstanding a few select departments, it is very common for MIT undergraduates to continue into MIT graduate programs.</p>

<p>*In discloser, I pursued graduate study in a field not offered a MIT (and not in mathematics). So, the above was a moot issue for me. Having not participated in the MIT grad application process, my perspective is from observation, not direct experience. So, take that for what it is worth.</p>