Profile evaluation from an international student - advice please!

Forum for the GRE subject test in mathematics.
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hook1993
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Oct 19, 2017 12:37 pm

Profile evaluation from an international student - advice please!

Post by hook1993 » Mon Oct 30, 2017 11:24 am

Undergrad Institution: Oxford University, UK
Major: Mathematics
GPA: High 2.i, somewhere between 3.5 - 3.7 but I'm not entirely sure how it converts.
Type of Student: International, White, Female

GRE Revised General Test: Taking 14th Nov. Good scores on practise tests.
Q: xxx (xx%)
V: xxx (xx%)
W: xx

Taking as estimates based on practise Q: 168 V: 161 W: 4

GRE Subject Test in Mathematics: Taken Oct 28th. I completely messed up time, and had to guess almost half. Very disappointed with myself and expecting a very low score, at best 50-60% percentile.

Programme Applying: Ph.D Pure Mathematics ( key research area of interest: topology)

Other Information:
3 great letters of recommendation from Oxford Professors, 4 year undergraduate masters, for my final two years I took advanced courses in: logic, set theory, topology and groups, Galois theory, algebraic number theory, communication theory, graph theory, integer programming, non-commutative rings, geometric group theory, infinite groups, model theory, combinatorics, probabilistic combinatorics, category theory, algebraic topology.

Applyting to Where:

UChicago
Northwestern
McGill
U of Toronto
Columbia
NYU
Cornell
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
University of Illinois Chicago
Stony Brook
Carnegie Mellon
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

As someone unfamiliar with the US system, I would really appreciate some feedback as to how realistic these choices are, and how much emphasis is placed on the subject GRE (surely a test of time pressure, which I am poor at, with mathematics i haven't done for several years and had little time to study for working full time, it seems frustrating that this should be a measure of how I can succeed in graduate research?) Is a strong academic background, a lot of advanced courses from a top instituion, and great references realistically going to make up for a very poor score?

Any advice at all would be very, very much appreciated. Thank you.

djysyed
Posts: 359
Joined: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:59 pm

Re: Profile evaluation from an international student - advice please!

Post by djysyed » Mon Oct 30, 2017 8:11 pm

I'm currently an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I would say you have a very good chance of being admitted since multiple students have scored in the 50% on the GRE Math Subject and you have a much stronger background than them.

solveit
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Oct 21, 2016 7:42 am

Re: Profile evaluation from an international student - advice please!

Post by solveit » Tue Oct 31, 2017 3:37 am

Hi! I went to Oxford too.

You'll probably be fine. I don't think people place too much emphasis on GREs if you're from a well-known institution.

Have you taken a year or two off after graduating? If you have, that's another reason for them to disregard the MGRE.

You seem to have a nice range of schools, so I expect you'll get admitted to at least one. You might want to look at some of the UCs. Berkeley and UCLA have great topology departments of course, and UC Davis also seems to punch above its ranking in topology.

Out of curiosity, is there a reason you're not applying to UK schools?



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