This repo provides an overview of my attempt to get into grad school for fall 2020 admission. I'm putting my application materials and results online because I think it would have helped me gauge where to apply if I could see others' applications/results. Hopefully my application and results can help others build a successful application.
If you find this helpful, and end up putting your grad app material on github, let me know and I'll put a link here.
I've applied for masters and phd programs for fall 2020 admissions. Mostly math programs, but one computer science and philosophy program also. It was rather hard for me to judge how good my application was as compared to others, which made it hard to pick schools. This was only exacerbated by the fact that I took a job after undergrad, and I wasn't sure how that affected the strength of my application.
| School | Department | Degree | Status | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brown University | Mathematics | PhD | ❌ | ❌ |
| Caltech | Applied Math | PhD | ❌ | ❌ |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Computer Science | PhD | ❌ | ❌ |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Philosophy | PhD | 💲 | ❌ |
| KTH + Stockholm University | Mathematics | MSc | ✅ | ❌ |
| UBC | Mathematics | MSc | ❌ | |
| University of Copenhagen | Mathematics | MSc | ❌ | ❌ |
| University of Hawai'i | Mathematics | PhD | ✅ | ❌ |
| University of Helsinki | Mathematics | MSc | ✅ | ❌ |
| University of Oregon | Mathematics | PhD | ❌ | ❌ |
| University of Pittsburgh | Mathematics | PhD | ✅ | ❌ |
| University of Washington | Applied Math | PhD | 💲 | ❌ |
| University of Waterloo | Mathematics | MSc | ✅ | ✅ |
| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | Mathematics | Msc | ✅ | ❌ |
- ❌ = rejected
- 💲 = rejected from PhD and offered a masters spot which requires tuition and no stipend
- ✅ = accepted!
⁉️ still haven't heard back
That makes 8 PhD programs and 6 Masters programs for a total of 14 programs. It was probably a few more than I really needed to apply to, but as mentioned above, I really wasn't sure how strong my application was. Applying cost me a total of about $1300 with the cost of each application being about $90 and then having to send official GRE scores to a few programs. See GRE stuff for more info on my GRE's.
Along with my CV, transcript and statement of purpose, a critical piece of my applications (and every application) were my letters of recommentations. I had four people agree to write me letters, but some schools only took three. These people were people who I think both knew me relatively well personally and academically. These people were
- Karsten Heeger
- Chair of Physics Department at Yale University
- P.I. of a lab I worked in for two summers during my bachelors
- John Lees-Miller
- CTO of Overleaf
- my boss since the summer of 2017, and a mathematician
- Edward Miller
- Professor of Mathematics at NYU Courant
- Took multiple classes with him, and two reading courses which only had 2-3 students.
- Luciano Medina
- Lecturer of Mathematics at NYU Courant
- Summer research and undergraduate thesis advisor
I took the general GRE in October of 2016, so thank god those scores were stil valid because I was not trying to take that again. I don't think I did particularly well, but I also have heard as long as you don't bomb the general test it's okay.
| Verbal Reasoning | Quantitative Reasoning | Analytical Writing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scaled Score | 151 | 162 | 4.0 |
| Percentile | 51 | 79 | 57 |
I chose to opt out of sending these to every school that did not require them for two reasons:
- sending official scores costs $30
- I don't like the tradition of using this test as any indicator of grad student success
Because I was unwilling (or really just didn't want to) to take the math subject GRE, I chose all programs that did not require it (although some recommended it). I had previously taken the physics GRE and seriously bombed it (when I was applying to physics PhD programs back in 2017), so wasn't confident I would do well on this one. I was worried initially this decision would come back to haunt me as there are still quite a few schools who require it. However, I found plenty of schhols that matched my criteria and didn't requite it, so in the end I was happy with the list of schools.
| thing | number |
|---|---|
| GPA | 3.62 |
| math GPA | 3.84 |
If you found any of this useful or interesting, great! If you have any questions regard my apps or grad apps in general, feel free to open an issue and we can have an open discussion about grad apps. If you'd prefer to keep things private, of course feel free to reach out to me at nate@stemen.email.
If you look at the git history for this repo, you'll see dates for each acceptance/rejection. While I updated this repo occasionally while hearing back from schools, I onlly went back after the fact to clean up the git history and change the dates to the exact date and time I recieved letters/emails from schools about their decision. This was wholly unecessary, but at least I can say it helped improve my git rebase and cherry-pick skills. I also used gitup quite a bit which helped a lot.