One thing you didn’t mention is interviews. When I applied to grad schools, I was looking at Ph.D. programs. They all did interviews. Perhaps it’s different if you’re only applying to a Masters program.
If you do get an interview, however, there’s a critical difference between applying as to undergrad and graduate programs. Schools look for undergraduates who look good in the general sense, but they don’t try to pair up undergraduates with specific programs, much less specific professors. Graduate schools, on the other hand, are very focused on finding incoming students who will fit in well with their specific programs. So when asked why you’re applying there, you don’t want vague answers. (“It looks like a good place for me.”) You want a specific answer. (“I looked at the department webpage and saw that there’s a work group of six professors working on solutions of PDEs in infinite-dimensional Sobolov spaces, which I’m interested in because it relates to certain problems in applied biology…”)
In my opinion, your overall undergraduate GPA is not very important; the important thing is your major GPA and the difficulty of courses you took, which are decent for you (but not great). But those graduate school grades are going to kill you. Even if you do well in the next semester or two, those grades are going to taint it. I would strongly consider staying in the program unless you see very good reasons not to.
Yes, although if you explain you might get away with it. It is not the GPA (only a fool–or a bureaucrat–looks at the GPA in grad school admissions. It is the lack of commitment. It is probably too late for a February application. But if a year from now you can present a couple of A’s and an explanation, it might work. What I would really recommend is that you sign up as a special student for a course in what you are interested (I think PDE might be the best one) and really ace it, then a year from now you might well get a favorable response.
Incidentally, in most graduate programs, a C is a failure. In fact here are McGill, it is an automatic expulsion, in principle. In practice you can petition for reinstatement and, the first time through, it is routinely granted. Graduate school is not the place for a “gentleman C”.
What kind of “science or research”? Business and finance involve a lot of science and research. What kind of “number crunching”? Are you thinking about programming, about being a logical analyst (ie, the guy who gives the algorithms to the programmers), about being a computer user, about using a blackboard? I needed to know multiariate differential calculus in order to understand the theory behind Quantum Chemistry, the equations - but I could have used the computer programs as black boxes; half of them are based on statistics, not on the equations (after all, the equations are an attempt at explaining the values stats gets).
I think the answers to the OP questions have been well-covered, and the only thing I can really add is this:
It’s becoming somewhat trendy to have a sort of ‘middle ground’ between the thesis and non-thesis options (at least in the humanities–this could be completely wrong for maths/sciences.)
The route I chose was to take an extra couple of classes and do a ‘capstone.’ My capstone was basically one course where you decided what type of research you’d like to do, where you would submit it, etc. Once you had the approval of the capstone advisor, you had 6 months to produce either a traditional thesis or (and this is what I did) something more akin to a scholarly journal article.
My reasoning for not doing the traditional thesis was because the format just felt wrong. My topic was one that didn’t lend itself well to a review of literature (because there wasn’t really much of it) and I didn’t think would work well unless I significantly added texts to consider.
Anyway, my ‘thesis’ wound up being roughly 30 pages or so, and although it was a non-traditional option, I got hired as a college instructor on my first application (granted this is at a community college.)
The only other thing I can offer is that I didn’t take the GRE. I was able to rely on my overall undergrad GPA (3.54) and my major GPA (4.0) as well as wonderful letters from former professors. Looking back, though, the GRE intimidated me more than it should have.
I don’t know how relevant this is for an academic degree, but I’m working on a professional masters and relevant work experience obviously counted for a lot when the admissions committee was making its decisions. For instance, one of my good friends in my program took eight years to get her BA, and her degree is from a commuter state college. How’d she get in? (This is at one of the top ten programs in the field in the country, btw, not an Ivy, but ranked higher than most of them.) She spent six years working in a really difficult job that gives her a lot of insight into the issue she wants to work in.
Since you want to work in the government sector, have you looked into getting an internship in a government agency? I expect that Portland has a fairly large municipal government and there might be a place for an unpaid worker looking for some experience. Plus, it could lead to an awesome letter of recommendation.
Yup, I’ll just chime in to agree with everyone else’s points:
-At least where I went to grad school, it was hard to make a C, and tantamount to flunking, and that’s probably what an admissions committee will conclude. But if you wait a year and pull up your grades in the meantime, you can argue that you just had a bad semester and I think that should be fine.
-I have never met any technical person who studied more than two days for the general GRE, and not a whole lot more than that for the subject GRE. I got a 750 on general math (for a physics program) because of carelessness (I should have got an 800; felt kind of dumb) and it was fine. Though since you have never taken any standardized tests you should get a book of practice tests and go through it so that you get the rhythm of how the time pressure works, when you want to work through the problem vs. working backwards from the answer, etc. The English portion is mostly to make sure you have a pulse; no one looks at that score unless you get all of them wrong or something.
-Recommendation letters are important. Again, waiting a year and talking to some profs in the meantime (go to their office hours? find out a little about their research?) is a really good idea. Harriet the Spry had a good suggestion; I would not suggest writing the actual letter yourself, but giving the professor a copy of your resume/application-details, along with a set of bullet points as to what the professor can say about you, is good so that s/he doesn’t have to start from scratch. (A high school teacher of mine REQUIRED resume-like information before he’d write a recommendation, which was a really great thing for him to do, as it made me realize that other teachers/profs would probably also like it as well.)
I did. Not a lot longer–maybe a couple weeks or so after work–but certainly longer than a couple days. It helped to get familiar with the type and wording of questions asked, and how many questions were in each section. I did some extra work on the most unfamiliar types of questions, and went through two or three full tests to make sure I could finish each section with time to spare.
I guess that’s not studying, per se, but spending time to get the rhythm of the test (as you say) and getting comfortable with the questions. All in all worthwhile; I’m certain I wouldn’t have done as well on the GRE as I did without the practice time.