Congrats to RacerX

[RacerX]

Gosh, thanks!

Let me see if I can shed any more light on those questions. I'll keep working on them after this post (which I am writing while being quite worn out, so I'm sure I am forgetting stuff), but I'll need a little more time. For now I can try and relate some of my experiences to the questions.

Graduate school (and other positions like what I did at the Geometry Center) seem to revolve (for me) around letters of recommendation. Because I was already taking graduate courses at UCSD very early on as a undergrad, continuing on with my graduate studies there was easy (and expected by most of the faculty). The position at the Geometry Center was more like what I would expect getting into a good graduate school would be like. The summer I was there, they had 20 positions that were being paid for by a combination NSF and DoE funding. There were over 250 applications for those positions, and the only reason I was one of the applicants selected was because I had some very nice letters of recommendation. The director of that program, Professor Phillips, told me that he really wanted to meet me after reading those letters (and even went on to supervise a number of my projects even after I returned to UCSD and he went back to Stony Brook).

So another thing is networking. While you are taking courses at Macalester, run over to the U and take (audit, actually) some courses that would interest you (I am actually thinking about doing this next year also). This gives you the chance to get to know faculty at the U and possibly get a letter of recommendation from someone at an outside institution. I would point out that these classes could be just as important as any that you would get a grade in because they could help you get into a good graduate school. And professors love students that go out of their way for their subject.

Another thing to think about, research. Many undergrad programs don't require you to do independent research, but this can be both very helpful and very fun. My first extended project was on the subject of vector displacement and Levi-Civita's connections via developable surfaces (not all that different from connections on tangent bundles, but predating those techniques by many decades). I did this in my very first upper division course (Math 150A, Differential Geometry), and even though it was not creating a new solution or method, it was recreating work that had been lost and ideas that had been over generalized. Even though my other projects generated unique material, the techniques used in that first one gave me my first taste of real mathematics. I was very honored to find out that 10 years later my professor was still using my paper as a reference in the classroom for that course.

I hadn't actually put too much thought into the job market. All my plans for the future revolved around sustaining my research habit. My cousin who has a graduate degree works as a teacher at a small college, and he is still interested in doing research (he got interested in Clifford Algebras after we had talked about them, and we worked on geometric techniques in Minkowski space using circular geometry). I guess I had always thought about trading teaching at some school for being able to do research. The nice thing is that mathematics is easier to get funding for than any of the other sciences (like physics or chemistry, both of which can be big budget science). From what I saw, the average NSF grant usually wasn't more than a few thousand dollars (mainly to cover equipment and pay for assistants, which was usually a computer or two and a few grad students).

On a number of occasions I have been asked to solve applied problems. We would get engineers and the like coming to our department asking for help, and some of my professors pointed them in my direction if the problem looked like something I was specializing in. It was only a few hundred dollars here and there, but it gave me a little taste of what someone would do with applied mathematics. Part of my problem is that I specialize in a type of mathematics that has very few applications. I have been able to apply my type of math to some areas of theoretical physics, but even then, it was pretty far from any real world applications. I'll ask around to see what types of other options are out there, I just haven't thought that much about it once I set myself on the path I had chosen.

I’ll add some more after I get some sleep.

[AdmiralAK]

I think netowrking (the non-compuiter kind) is grande -- If you have a job on campus it is infinitelly easier to network (depending on the job that is) because you will interact with faculty. Then you can get the inside track on classes, courses offered, materials and such. Not only that, you can also enter into classes which are otherwise full

[xoot]

Something about the subject of networking (the computer kind):

I love freaking people out with Apple Events. And it's easy to do!

I will teach the people that don't know if there are any...

[Valrus]

Thanks a lot, Racer! I'd write a longer reply but I'm fast approaching bedtime. I'm back to getting up at 6:00 to go to work at GEICO...

I will say, though, that auditing classes at the U might be a little bit out of my reach, because of transportation considerations etc. If I find out that it's easier than I think it will be though, I'll definitely try to do it my senior year!

-the valrus

[xoot]

There's no shame in using public transportation, sir!

I just love that commercial. I only wish that I could be the kid racing BlueFusion.

[RacerX]

The last four days has been quite sad for me.

Take care my friends...



see ya on the other side.