I’m pretty sure everyone knows that graduates from MIT build better, safer bridges and buildings than graduates from Lesser Poly Tech. I won’t go inside a building unless I confirm it was designed and built by a MIT graduate.
In case anyone missed it: The Jar Problem thread. OP is interested in entering math contests (the better to enhance that resume perhaps), which seems to mean the kind of contests where you try to guess the number of candies in a jar.
No reason to diss his intonation, though.
I wonder what POWER is.
Did Baron Acton go to MIT?
That’s good. We have few posters who joined at your age or even younger and stuck with this board through college and now are working professionals in their late 20’s :eek: Some of them took the collective advice to heart are doing quite well. It is fun to see people grow and change over time so stick with us and you will do just fine.
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevski is his name!
sorry
It might be one of the Wall Street analytics guys. von Neumann, my academic grandfather, started pretty well off I believe.
I’m glad you’ve seen the light. Don’t even think about majoring in Math until you’ve taken calculus. If that is easy for you, go for it. You still have SATs to take also.
It is great to apply to top schools, but make sure to visit them. My kids changed their preferences dramatically after visiting. Next year is a good time, but it is not too early now to visit someplace close, like Yale or MIT. When I visited after being accepted I was put up in the old Burton with a bunch of phone hackers - and I knew it was the place for me.
Guys…what do you think people on Wall Street do? With a math or engineering degree from MIT you would certainly qualify for an analyst job at Goldman Sachs or any other investment bank. They tend to pay well.
“Don’t go into engineering because you won’t get rich” is terrible advice. Engineers on average earn more than most fields. If you want to be “rich”, either start your own billion dollar business, play first base for the Yankees or write a series of succesfull young adult books. Or have a long and successful career.
There’s a growing demand in the buisness world for “data scientists” and “predictive analytics” experts. People with strong backgrounds in mathmatics and statistics who can apply their knowledge to business decision making. They pay pretty well too.
Here’s a tip that you won’t really believe until you’ve been out in the world for several years. If you want money and power, you’re going to have to take risks. And the more money and power you want, the more risk you’re going to have to be willing to take.
For that matter, you’re going to have to take risks even if you decide to become a concert violinist, or a lowly math teacher. So I’ll tell you the same thing I told my kids – once you decide what you want out of life, the path to getting there lays itself out.
At a net worth of around $10.6 billion, Jim Simons has got to be up there…
ENERGY/TIME
In all caps, of course.
I’d say wait until set theory or at least linear algebra. By that point you’re already putting your foot in the door of math major-ness, but I think those two are good indicators of whether you’ll like the more abstract, symbol system analysis higher level math tends to entail. At least, I know that I don’t really like calculus that much, but I love set theory and linear algebra, if you’d have asked me if I wanted to do higher level math when I only knew pre-calc or calc I’d probably have said no – because I had no idea about all the cool stuff with sets, and I hadn’t done proofs yet.
A kid who said he loved music and math and the rest of school and extracurricular activities and whatnot, and then turns around and says what he really, really wants is money and power, is not a kid I would want my kid hanging out with, nor, I suspect, would anyone responsible for a productive and decent student population.
Simply put, kids simply have no idea what real mathematics and music making are, or indeed, don’t know much of anything regarding long-term commitment to known endeavors, let alone unknown ones. Most of their ideas regarding money and power would be no less inchoate and no less off the mark, if not bizarre.
(For me, at any rate, money was the thing with which I could buy weed. Power, let me think. Power to have the girls in my high school lust for me? Power to continue to cut Economics and not be damaged? That’s power.)
Kids, God bless 'em, don’t yet know about squaring circles. But affecting attraction to solving certain squared circles, even if thoroughly unknowable to children, strikes me as creepy and downright repellant. I would have no desire to advise or place such a student at all.
Wow. Way to completely miss my point. First off, I’m definitely not saying “don’t go into engineering.” I am an engineer. I’m an electrical engineer, I’ve got my PE, I make good money. I am certainly not rich, nor is pretty much any engineer I know. The only ones who ARE approaching something in the ‘rich’ department are those who, as you mention, own their own business. Which was my whole point.
You don’t become an engineer to get rich. If you think that becoming an engineer is going to get you rich, there is a VERY good chance you’ll be disappointed. The money is in business. Now, engineering certainly can lead to business ownership, but if you have a desire to simply be a mathematician, or an engineer, chances are you aren’t going to be ‘rich and powerful.’ If you’re competent, you will have a good career, making good money and have a comfortable life.
There is a big misconception among MANY people that “I’m going to go to MIT and become an engineer” = $500,000 salary. It just ain’t so. Sure, there are some that will make that kind of money or more just from engineering, but it’s a VERY small percentage. Those that make the money become business owners. The rest make good money, and after 20 years of experience, many make VERY good money…but not what you would generally call ‘rich.’
Great call!
The man is a walking theorem. Can’t get much better than that:
Simons’ research involved the discovery and application of certain geometric measurements, and resulted in the Chern-Simons form (also known as Chern-Simons invariants, or Chern-Simons theory). In 1974, his theory was published in Characteristic Forms and Geometric Invariants, co-authored with the differential geometer Shiing-Shen Chern. The theory is used in theoretical physics, particularly string theory.
And all together now, where did he go to school?
…MIT!
I know whose poster I’m putting up in my room!
You don’t get linear algebra in high school, so I mentioned something you do get. It is not going to tell you if you can do topology. But a good thing about MIT is you can change easily. A friend of mine was a math major - until the secretary of the department told him that he would be allowed to pass a class if he switched majors.
He’s a lawyer now, probably making more than most of us.
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The people on Yahoo Answers were screwing around with you.
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Please stop pulling facts and numbers out of your ass. If you “look at the top schools” you will never (ever) find any indication of what scores accepted students were getting in individual subjects. Why? Because there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of ways grades are determined across the tens of thousands of high schools across the country, and without any sort of context, individual scores are ENTIRELY meaningless.
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Focusing on benchmarks (“I gotta get a 98 in math”, “MIT requires a 1500 on the SAT”, “I have to be involved in three more activities”) is a recipe for absolute disaster. If you would take 15 minutes out of your life and call MIT’s admissions department, they’ll tell you flat out that they don’t have benchmarks - for the exact reason I laid out in #2 above - individual grades are far too subjective and contextless to compare meaningfully across multiple applicants. The SAT is a level playing field - but you’ll find a far wider range of scores among any incoming class than I think you’d realize.
I think we are pretty much in agreement. Students shouldn’t think of cherry picking certain majors or schools because they think there is some big payday once they graduate. Absolutly NOBODY pays college undergrads grads half a million a year. Mckinsey and Goldman Sachs pay entry level MBAs probably around high $100,000 (plus bonus). And even if you are an MIT grad, you would start in a analyst class of dozens of other grads from MIT, Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and so on.
Plus its not like you are stuck doing the same thing for the rest of your life. You can go into engineering, then get into the business/management side, then go into academia, then do some independent consulting. The important thing (and this is where top schools like MIT help) is to build the basic skills and qualifications to have a long-term career.
If you look at my quote again, I specifically mentioned “power” rather than “wealth”.
Sure, it’s possible to make a fair amount of money with a math degree (whether or not it’s easy to become “rich” - which has some fuzzy boundaries - is a more difficult question to answer). And even so, you’re much more likely to make more money with degrees in other fields.
At any rate, you simply aren’t going to be joining the ranks of the powerful with a math degree. I imagine you can find an exception, but that exception will be all the more exceptional for being exceedingly rare.
I see WATT you did there.