Where do I stand?

Forum for the GRE subject test in mathematics.
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hdinh2707
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Dec 25, 2012 3:12 am

Where do I stand?

Post by hdinh2707 » Tue Dec 25, 2012 3:50 am

Hello all,

I'm new to this forum, but I have heard great things about it and would like advice on where I should apply. I also had a rough freshman year due to family matters. I'm not sure if that matters.
University: State university not known for undergraduate math, but known graduate applied math

Courses/Grades:

Freshmen:
Calc I/II - AP'd out
Calc III - B
Linear Algebra (lower level) - A-
Int. Analysis - B+
Vector Analysis - B
Differential Equations - A

Sophomore(Dean's List):
Abstract Algebra - A
PDE(lower level) - C (I forgot to drop and had missing grades)
Advanced Multivariate Calculus - A-
Probability - A
Mathematics of Signals Representation - A
Linear Algebra I (Senior sequence) - A
Linear Algebra II(Senior sequence) - A-
Complex Analysis - A

Junior(In Progress/Dean's List)
PDE 1(Senior Sequence) - A
Real Analysis - A
Toplogy(Graduate) - W (The workload was too much with PDE, Real and int. mech.)

In addition, I also have taken physics I,II (intro. mech, electro, heat), modern physics(QM) and intermediate mechanics
Research/Awards/Activities

Awards: a competitive UH research scholarship, PURS, and UTMB's SURP with research award nominee.
Positions: Pi Mu Epsilon - VP

Research:

Freshman/Sophomore - Ion Beam Accelerator Lab under a distinguished professor. I worked on simulations and nano-ripples. No publications.

Sophomore Summer - Image Processing jointly with a UTMB group. 1 publication as 1st author
Fields in consideration -
Machine Learning
Algebraic Topology in Apps
Anything with Signals or PDE as the main focus
Applications of Algebra
Where do I stand and to which universities should I apply?

rmg512
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:15 pm

Re: Where do I stand?

Post by rmg512 » Wed Dec 26, 2012 3:59 pm

Almost every school only cares about your last 2 years. Everything you've listed as lower level is probably inconsequential. Though, I don't get how PDE's could be lower level. Do you mean lower level ODE's? At your stage (Junior year), it's hard to say where you stand. However, if you keep up the good grades next semester, keep taking hard classes (especially graduate courses!), get involved in research both on and off campus in MATH (though, don't get me wrong: those other research programs are nice to see), and make sure your professors like you and can say good things about you (you could sit in on their graduate seminars or take independent reading courses with them, for instance), you should be able to get into a very good program (or a GREAT program if you can really kick ass on the GRE Subject Test, though don't count on it).

Also, word of advice: DO NOT graduate early if you don't have to! You want to optimize your time as an undergraduate before you go into a Ph.D. program.

hdinh2707
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Dec 25, 2012 3:12 am

Re: Where do I stand?

Post by hdinh2707 » Wed Dec 26, 2012 10:49 pm

rmg512, UH has a intro to PDE course required for undergraduate engineering and some science majors which only covers solutions to PDEs common to both fields. I decided to drop the course since I was taking 17 hours that semester with no light classes and solving a PDE problem took me 30 minutes since I was blindly following a recipe given by the Haberman book. Problem sets with 20+ problems made the schedule impossible because of time constraints.

Thanks for the advice! I guess I'll study as hard as I can hope for the best.

BTW, how much do they care about general GRE? I hear it's pretty tough now.

rmg512
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:15 pm

Re: Where do I stand?

Post by rmg512 » Fri Dec 28, 2012 1:45 am

The general GRE wasn't so bad. I didn't score super great (83%) on the quantitative, probably because I got lazy and didn't double check everything. I did get 89% on the Verbal, though, and the secret there was that I crammed the vocabulary; do that and you're fine. For the analytic writing, you might want to study a little more seriously. Half a point is 20 percentile points in some cases, which I think is bullshit. Also, those prompts are bullshit.



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