Do W's look bad on transcripts? And which school looks better for a Math PhD?

dshinka
Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:12:34 +0000

I a math major and intend to go to grad school to get a PhD and continue to do research in either pure math or some sort of geometry.

I graduated from High School Spring 2007. I started at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Fall 2007 and dropped out Fall 2008 the following year, due to losing my AFROTC scholarship due to a medical condition I was diagnosed with. I just read on another thread here that W’s look bad on transcripts - I have 6 so far, 5 from the quarter I dropped out of and one from a computer science course I dropped and retook the next quarter and got an A. So my first question is, did I just screw myself over?

I have two choices - go back to Rose-Hulman after spending a year at the University of Florida (Tier 4 school I think), getting all my humanities and non-math courses done at UNF (no math courses) or go to Vanderbilt this fall (what I’m leaning towards). Vanderbilt has a PhD math program (whereas Rose doesn’t even have a Master’s) and I got done with the first 2 years of math curriculum at Rose, so I’ll have enough time to take a year of graduate Topology, a year of Graduate real analysis and maybe even Complex or Functional Analysis (not sure if I want to minor in Philosophy, or not - that would probably take that third year-long graduate sequence away). So my second question is what would look better to grad schools - Rose or Vanderbilt? Rose is #1 ranked for engineering, but only against schools without PhD’s… Oh and if I went back to Rose I’d probably double-major in Computer Science because Rose doesn’t have enough of the math courses I’d like to take (they have a lot of probability, applied and discrete courses), however again, I’m thinking I’d like pure math since I loved Linear Algebra and disliked Discrete math and Statistics/Probability… I have yet to take Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis, Complex Analysis and Undergrad Topology, though so I’m not 100% sure about the field I want.

I guess I also have to specify what grad schools I’m looking for - I don’t really care about the name of the grad school I go to - I just want a school that’s strong in whatever sub-topic of math I end up liking since my goal is to continue doing research in Academia.