There is a club for everyone at UCLA. Have him check out the Enigma Club (enigmaatucla.com). My daughter is an engineering major and just finished her first year. Friends are members of this club and she joined them a few times for some “epic” (in her words) board gaming. And that’s all I know about board games at UCLA. UCLA is indeed huge; there are however many socially shy students there. The clubs are a good way to find your tribe.
The non-competitive clubs are the most fun, according to my daughter. Hope this helps.
I would avoid GT for Math. They are very restrictive on allowing one to take higher level math courses unless you have taken the course at another Uni or CC. They limit the number of courses you can test out of to 2-3 courses only. Many of the HS kids that have spent time in math competitions will not be adequately challenged at GT and will find it necessary to repeat courses for which they know the material already.
“Few extracurriculars” will not matter much if at all for universities in Canada. This makes me tend to agree with the other comments that you look to the north. I agree with others that you could look at Toronto in addition to Waterloo. UBC, McGill, Alberta (brrr) and Queens are also quite good for math.
One daughter did go “slightly abroad” to Canada for her bachelors. She got to take more classes in her major and fewer unrelated classes. To me her honours thesis looked quite a bit like a master’s thesis for a US university. It was not however in a subject that I know much about. When she originally applied, some of the schools that she applied to did not even allow her to list ECs. She did need to say “I am a US citizen” several times in various job interviews after returning to the US.
This reminds me that one thing that your son might want to do is to look at the graduation requirements in a range of different universities. This should include both the overall general requirements and the math-specific requirements.
One other thought: I did my master’s degree in a subfield of mathematics (Operations Research) at Stanford University. The other students in the same program had done their bachelor’s degree at a very, very wide range of universities. It was difficult to find two people who had graduated from the same university (except for a small group from Bell Labs most of whom were Rutgers graduates). Many students came from their in-state public universities. There are not a lot of math secrets that MIT and Stanford are teaching their undergraduate students that you could not also learn at a wide range of other universities.
Which does suggest also looking in-state.
UCB is very good for graduate level mathematics if your son can get admitted.
No, they are courses offered through the high school. This is a special school for kids who love math. The content is the same as college and graduate level courses, taught by PhDs, but they are not specifically approved as college level courses.
Thank you for this suggestion. We will expand our search in Canada! I love your point that Stanford and MIT can’t really hide away math secrets that are not also taught at many other great schools.
It might be a lot harder to get credit for them in college. My kid had to repeat Multivariable Calculus (the only post Calculus BC math class she took in school, and, yes, with a PhD holding math teacher). However, your student will have the knowledge of previous students of their specialty school to rely on so I’m not as worried. He might have to petition the math department to skip the classes he has already taken. Maybe a smaller school with less bureaucracy might be best…
Best would be to contact the math department of each college under consideration to see what its placement (possibly by exam) policy is for this type of situation, in order to avoid wasteful repeating of material already learned. (Math department policies on this may be applicable only to math majors.)
As others have noted, Berkeley and UCLA have phenomenal math departments. My SO recently completed a PhD and postdoc in pure math at the latter and had some extremely talented students who got into great PhD programs.
There is no handholding of any sort, however, so one has to hit the ground running and be ready to seek out advising and research opportunities. Additionally, courses often move quickly since the quarter system results in some courses covering a topic in one quarter instead of a semester (or two quarters instead of a year).
With respect to appropriate suggestions, you may want to clarify your son’s math level. For example, will he have completed courses in these topics before entering college?
Linear algebra
Real analysis
Modern algebra
Complex analysis
Topology
Functional analysis
Wesleyan
Most people don’t realize that Wesleyan has a grad program. Topology is a department specialty. And, it’s several orders of magnitude easier to get into than MIT:
It seems to me that the primary objectives of OP’s son are a) the college have sufficient course offerings in higher math; and b) he doesn’t have to repeat courses for materials that he already knew.
Fortunately for him, there’re many colleges that meet his first objective. Math is one subject area where both breadth and depth can be readily found. Some colleges are, of course, stronger than others in math, but unless he’s so outstanding in math that he has few peers, he should be able to find what he needs in most of the colleges that have been mentioned.
The big difference, however, could be in the second objective. Some colleges are much more rigid (@yeartogo mentioned GT, but there’re many others) while few others are much more relaxed in their rules about registering for advanced courses. Some allow you to test out almost any course. And some allow you to skip any “required” prerequisites without prior approval (i.e. letting you make your own decision whether the course is right for you).
If Cal Tech or MIT are dreams , wouldn’t CMU and JHU be similar but a notch easier ? Another mentioned UMD. Very strong in math.
If he’s taking college and grad level classes since 7th grade, won’t he have an academic mentor already to steer him ? After all, how many 13-15 year olds are in college classes or grad school ? I would think schools would be recruiting him, like he’s a protege. Where did he take these undergrad and grad classes as a teen ?
And credit wise wouldn’t he already be down a path ??
@merc81: In case it is helpful, in the last two years, he took the following math classes: Elliptic Curves; Real Analysis; Model Theory; Algebraic Topology; Theory of Continued Fractions; Category Theory; Complex Analysis; Differential Geometry; Noncommutative Ring Theory; and Ideals and Varieties. They can cover a lot because they spend 2 hours each day on math.
Thank you to everyone who responded, with so many thoughtful and excellent recommendations. In case others are new to the thread, here are a few key things I learned:
Look for schools that will be more flexible in allowing students to skip certain math pre-requisites, based on their previous advanced coursework. Several people recommend UCSB because their College of Creative Studies lets students skip to more advanced math classes, and it has a great graduate math program.
“Pointy” kids like my son, with good grades and scores and advanced math classes, but few extracurriculars, will have a much better chance of admission to schools in Canada (e.g. Waterloo) and the UK (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge) because those schools don’t care so much about ECs. However, need to understand the very different admissions requirements for schools in other countries. For Cambridge, for example, you have to take the STEP exam, with results in August – after some US schools begin.
Consider whether the school also will have broad graduation requirements for non-math classes. Harvey Mudd and U Chicago, for example, have broad requirements. UK and Canadian schools, in general, will not.
For kids like mine who don’t have the ECs (or superstar math competition awards) to be admitted to the top tier (e.g. CalTech, MIT, Standford, Princeton, Harvard, etc.), don’t despair! There are many other awesome math schools. In California, Cal and UCLA in particular, but also San Diego, Davis, and Irvine. Big schools like UCLA offer no hand holding! (So maybe not the best for shy kids – though maybe that’s how they learn to self advocate.)
Kids like my son may want a university with a graduate math program, so they don’t run out of math classes. However, also look into cross registration programs like the Baltimore Collegetown Association (Johns Hopkins and Loyola Maryland, which offers a pure math concentration.) Similarly, CGU offers a PHD in math, and those classes are available to Harvey Mudd students.
Read the course descriptions and professor descriptions to get a sense of the breadth and width of classes taught.
Other elite math schools (and definitely reaches for my son) include: U Chicago, CMU. (No one mentioned Duke, but it seems to be well ranked as well.)
Target schools for a kid like mine might include: University of Maryland, NYU (Courant school); Rice; U Washington, U Wisconsin
Safety schools with great math programs include: UIUC; UMN; CUNY
If he is lucky enough to attend ULCA, the Enigma club does board gaming!
For cross registration, check how difficult commuting is between the campuses, whether the academic calendars are aligned, what the policies around cross registration are, and how full the desired courses are. Cross registration is more convenient at a school across the street with the same academic calendar which is lenient with enrolling cross registration students, and where the desired courses do not get filled up before cross registration students. It can be difficult to use if the school is a half hour commute away, on a different calendar, restrictive on cross registration, and where the desired courses are usually full before cross registration students can enroll.
While these schools are tough to get into, they offer a lot of flexibility. For example, at Princeton, for any course, you can talk to the Prof for a half an hour and get into the course. Especially in subjects like Math. The pre-reqs are only suggestions and can be completely waived. The phrase used is that the Prof ascertains whether you have the “mathematical maturity” to handle the course. Of course the Prof may determine that your student’s background is insufficient to skip the pre-req because the pre-reqs are done at a very high level. At the Math departments in places like this though you may find that you are overmatched by the other students. And the courses run deep and fast. Typical homework loads run 10-15 hours a week per course for the average student – even though a HW typically has only a small number of problems.
No harm in throwing some lottery ticket apps that way.
Yes this is key. There’s a presumption amongst Americans that a broad education is best, whereas the UK system is about a deep education and preparing you for a PhD in your chosen subject.
You’ll do about twice as much math in three years (30 courses or so) as a typical math major requires in a four year US degree. But you’ll never write a single essay during that time (that’s what a PhD thesis is for!). Math can be less work than any other subject for some people, but it can be an overwhelming burden for others, who may wrestle with a problem set for days and not make much progress: typically you’d have two problem sets a week, which could each take anywhere from 3-15 hours to complete (most people don’t finish all the questions). And in my experience it was not a collaborative process at all (unlike the claimed approach at some US colleges of working together on problem sets), it was a test of individual imagination, all in preparation for difficult exams where the top students would answer 2-3 times as many questions as a good student, and 8-10 times more than a not so good student.
Some students can’t imagine anything more enjoyable than doing challenging math the whole time, and that’s what the admissions tutors are looking for. You want to be the student who wakes up in the morning having dreamt the answer to the problem set you were working on the previous day, and definitely not the one who pulls an all nighter in a fruitless attempt to keep up. There’s a good quote in the Cambridge course summary which exemplifies this attitude (and is not at all the sort of thing I can imagine a US college saying):
“Most students will find that there is enough mathematics in Part IA to keep them busy (or very busy!), and the Faculty places no expectations on students beyond keeping up with the first-year lectures, examples sheets and supervisions. There are many other educational and recreational opportunities to enjoy at university, though mathematics itself can hopefully be recreational.”