Trouble finding a PhD program. - sci.math

Message from discussion Trouble finding a PhD program.

Dave L. Renfro

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More options Nov 19 2009, 11:06 pm

Newsgroups: sci.math

From: "Dave L. Renfro" <renfr...@cmich.edu>

Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:06:19 -0800 (PST)

Local: Thurs, Nov 19 2009 11:06 pm

Subject: Re: Trouble finding a PhD program.

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sanboz

> Besides you have to get accepted first anyway, and that
> is a bitch. You have a 4.00 or a 3.90 in Math upper level
> courses?

My recollection is that it's fairly easy to get into
a U.S. Ph.D. program, excluding the top 10 to top 15
programs. I don't think I had much more than a 3.0
(around 3.10 to 3.15), and around 2.7 overall GPA,
and I got into all 4 programs I applied to in 1981
(Indiana Univ., Virginia Tech, Washington State, and
Univ. of Colorado). In fact, much later, in the early
1990s, a director of graduate studies I knew at a
school roughly the same level as these told me that
if you're a U.S. citizen, you'd have to have something
really against you to not be accepted into his program.
I would assume the same is true today, and probably
more so.

What *IS* hard in most every program is passing the
qualifying exams. When I passed mine I was one of
5 out of 15 that passed. Then you have to write a
Dissertation, although from what I've seen, the
fall-out is much lower here than with the Qualifying
Exams (unlike some other fields, especially in the
humanities).

Dave L. Renfro

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