Just to pile on a little more, the notion that MIT is the best place to study math as an undergraduate is at least dubious. You know, if you wanted to study some particular subfield of science or engineering where you felt that you had to do laboratory research in that subfield as an undergraduate, it might make sense for you to feel that you would have to do it in some university with a laboratory that specialized in that subfield. But in math all you need is a whiteboard.
For that reason, it might be as good to study at some very selective small liberal arts college as at a large university with top researchers in math. You’ll get more personal attention at the liberal arts college than at a well-known university where, as an undergraduate, you might not even have much a chance of seeing the famous mathematicians who teach there. Such small liberal arts colleges are often willing to involve undergraduates in research, while the big universities with prestigious graduate programs often restrict research to grad students. Some liberal arts colleges have a larger proportion of their bachelor’s degree graduates go on to get Ph.D.'s than a place like MIT (where grad students get more attention).
In fact, while we’re on the subject, let me recommend my undergraduate school, New College in Sarasota, Florida. You’ve never heard of the place?:
Despite having only a little more than 4,000 alumni, we’ve already had a Fields Medalist. You don’t know what the Fields Medal is?:
I think that means that we’ve turned out a higher proportion of Fields Medalists per total number of alumni than any other college in the world. It’s also near the top in producing Fulbright Fellows and more generally in getting its students admitted to top graduate, medical, law, and business schools. In any case, Anonymous User, you need to do a much better job of investigating what are the best places to study math (or whatever field you eventually decide to major in).
Let me show you just how little going to MIT influences whether you become a great mathematician. Click on the link in my last post for the Fields Medal. Consider where these mathematicians did their undergraduate work. You’ll recall that in one of my posts I said that your attitude sounded like that of a recent immigrant who assumed that the U.S. is like your home country, where it’s absolutely necessary for someone to attend the top university in the country or their future career is ruined. Go through the list of where the Fields Medalists did their undergraduate work. (Yes, the list of Fields Medalist winners is not a perfect list of great mathematicians of the past eighty years or so, but it’s reasonably good for a small sample.)
Now, it’s true that in some countries nearly all the medalists went to a single university as an undergraduate. Nearly all the British medalists went to Cambridge and nearly all the French medalists went to the École Normale Supérieure. But look how different it is for the American medalists.
Curtis T. McMullen went to Williams College.
Edward Witten went to Brandeis University.
Michael Freedman went to the University of California at Berkeley.
William Thurston went to New College.
Daniel Quillen went to Harvard University.
Charles Fefferman went to the University of Maryland.
David Mumford went to Harvard University.
John G. Thompson went to Yale University.
Stephen Smale went to the University of Michigan.
Paul Cohen went to Brooklyn College.
John Milnor went to Princeton University.
Jesse Douglas went to Columbia University.
Notice something? Not a single one went to MIT. So forget this nonsense that it’s absolutely necessary to go to MIT to be a great mathematician.
I got an 88 on a recent quiz, and on today’s mini-cumulative (or mini-quizzes), I sucked so hard. I got a freaking 80 on it! My average last quarter was a 93.867 in mathematics, and my overall average was a 96.20 (unweighted), or on the 4.0 scale, a 4.0.
This quarter I have an 86.785 right now!!! I know quarter 2 just started today, but this is ridiculous. What do I do??? Will MIT get pissed at me?
Yes, Anonymous User, MIT has hacked into your school’s computers and knows what scores you’re getting on all your tests. Not only will they now not admit you when you apply to them, but they’re going to torture you about that fact. They have sent out a squad of students to your town who will stand outside your school each day as you go home and chant all together, “Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah, nyaah, nyaah. You’re not getting into MIT.”
Here’s one more indication of the fact that while MIT is extremely good at preparing mathematicians, it’s not the overwhelmingly great place that you think that it is. Look at the list of the cumulative appearances in the top five teams in the Putnam competition. You do know what the Putnam competition is, don’t you?:
The Putnam Competition is an annual test given to North American college math teams. Look at the cumulative appearances table, where each college is ranked by the number of times their team has been among the top five teams in total scoring. Yes, MIT is very good, since it’s at second place in the ranking. But it’s not at number one, and the various colleges given in that table are actually reasonably close. Again, it’s not remotely true that MIT is far above other colleges in the mathematical abilities of their students. It’s very good, and it’s close to being best, but a number of other colleges are quite close in quality.
Wendell Wagner, I agree with your point that it has not been shown that MIT is better than anywhere else for math. However, Anonymous User has made it abundantly clear in this thread that he does not want to be a mathematician; he wants to get a useful degree and make a lot of money. I suspect that he can still do that without an MIT degree if he wants to, and in fact, I suspect that he would be unhappy at MIT if he did get in, based on what he’s said here. But giving him examples of mathematicians from other schools isn’t going to sway him.
I just read through this thread, and I have to say: You are looking at this backwards. It’s so important to you to make at least $100,000 right out of college, but you don’t seem to consider that there may not be any jobs that pay that much that you’d actually enjoy doing. And yeah, that matters.
You talk as if you’re willing to do anything that will pay the (incredibly high, for a starting salary) sum you’ve set your mind on, but what you don’t seem to realize is that this isn’t just a job you’re talking about – it’s literally your life. If you devote yourself to a career doing something you don’t particularly enjoy just to bring home an “impressive” paycheck, you will almost certainly end up very unhappy. Money will not make you happy by itself. It won’t earn you respect, either. There’s a term for an adult who goes around flaunting where he went to school or how much money he makes – that term is “asshole.”
The key to happiness, in very general terms, is striking a balance between your work, your friends, your family, and yourself that you feel comfortable with. Some people are happy working insanely high-stress, high-paying jobs, because they have the kinds of personalities that thrive in that kind of environment. Some people are happy making enough money to get by doing jobs that give them a chance to do things or work with people that they find interesting and engaging. Maybe you’re one of the former, and if so, good for you. But both kinds of people are happy to be doing what they’re doing.
td;dr version:
You should stop thinking about success in terms of how much you want to get paid, and start thinking about it in terms of living life in a way that you personally find fulfilling. As long as you’re happy doing what you’re doing, no one can say you’re doing it “wrong.”
Dude, MIT will reject you for that. Not your math score, but being anal about it. If you do get into MIT you will get some bad grades. The last thing they want is some clown freaking out about getting below class average and jumping off the Hahvahd Bridge. Lot of extra work for the deans.
My year was the second year they did that. It pissed the juniors off royally! But pass/fail would not prevent certain people from being anal about test grades. Tools tooled pass/fail or not.
Yeah, I was a transfer student, so I never got the benefit of it, either. And I agree that the tools will tool no matter what. Frankly, if I were on the admission committee and saw Anonymous User, I probably wouldn’t admit him with a 4.0 and perfect SATs, because I think his toolish attitude would shine through in his application. But MIT at least tries to weed them out and to prevent their jumping off the bridge.
Listen, I was THE Miss Smarty Pants at my very nice Connecticut high school, got into an early entry program at Clarkson University and skipped my senior year, eventually got into Duke Law School, had stellar scores on almost everything I did, and came up with mind-boggling skills for law on every “what you should be when you grow up” test. My trajectory was set from the time I was your age, and with some slight modifications I achieved everything in my plan.
Then I was miserable, because the only thing I knew how to do was achieve on aptitude tests and college classes. And it turned out I was totally unsuited to law temperamentally, however smart I was at analytical thought and whatnot. Boatloads of people my age have rewarding, robust careers in law making obscene amounts of money, all with a much less elite education than mine. Mostly because they actually knew what they wanted and went after it, rather than knowing where they wanted to graduate from.
Ironically, if you take a more mindful approach to life and stop obsessing about this stuff, not only will it make you happier and lead you to a more rewarding career in the end, it will also make you a more desirable applicant to colleges. It’s like a zen koan! You can’t fake authenticity, and if you try you’ll probably be unhappy with the result.
I was going to try a wiseass answer, like “Take Massachusetts Avenue north (well, northwest) to ______ and turn right,” but in the couple minutes I wasted on a bad joke I found there doesn’t seem to be a way into MIT except by foot. Or bicycle. Lots of bike paths, though.
MIT doesn’t have the most attractive campus around either. It has a good location but lots of bad design. I used to walk across it every day during lunch when I worked near it. Harvard is right down the street and their campuses practically touch. It is just a short walk from one to the other. You can also see Boston University right across the Charles River and walk to it as well. Boston is littered with college campuses that seem to run one right into the other.
I preferred my college campuses to be prettier and more isolated like Dartmouth but some people like being in a big city with critical mass of students. The People’s Republic of Cambridge has never been my thing even when I worked there. There are some seriously off people wandering around.
It’s also not clear that MIT is where you want to go if you want a high paying job. A friend of a friend said it really well a few years ago (scroll down to “I’ll start with a non-sequitur”)
> Wendell Wagner, I agree with your point that it has not been shown that MIT is
> better than anywhere else for math. However, Anonymous User has made it
> abundantly clear in this thread that he does not want to be a mathematician;
> he wants to get a useful degree and make a lot of money. I suspect that he can
> still do that without an MIT degree if he wants to, and in fact, I suspect that he
> would be unhappy at MIT if he did get in, based on what he’s said here. But
> giving him examples of mathematicians from other schools isn’t going to sway
> him.
That’s true, but the fact is that the OP is confused in a dozen different ways. I decided to look at just one small way that it’s confused in three of my most recent four posts (and the fourth one was just a joke). (In previous posts, I looked at other ways in which the OP is confused.) My point in those three posts is that even if you look at one of the narrowest claims of the OP, it’s wrong. MIT is not a vastly better place to study math as an undergraduate than any other college in the U.S. It’s a pretty good place to do it, but so are several dozen other places.
