Graduate Admission into MIT

v_90
Fri, 30 May 2008 10:24:11 +0000

Anonamous: I agree that many problems from Putnam are problems that can be solved by certain clever techniques/tricks, and considering that the scope of knowledge required for IMO is limited, in IMO too frequently problems all of which may be solved the same general trick/technique tend to crop up - it is hard to prevent this, considering with the multitude of problems available, it is hard to come up with something completely original. In my opinion, what I enjoyed most about IMO problems are the problems that were original/different/strange, and would often be lattermost questions in the paper. In competition conditions, I find it difficult to solve these problems; but trying these problems and solving them in my own time is always very satisfying, since the solutions are very beautiful and elegant, requiring some trick that isn’t well-known.
My Science/Commerce degree would usually be 5 years here as well, but I hope to finish a bit earlier by overloading maths subjects and doing some subjects in winter/summer school - some commerce subjects, especially first year ones, tend to be quite dry, so I find it much more enjoyable doing really interesting maths subjects at the same time. I have a friend who’s doing Honors currently in both subjects and will have finished after just 4 years, I hope I can do something similar.
About my marks, I am confident that with some work a 90-95 average in my Maths/Science subjects should be doable(but getting >95 I would find difficult). However, with Commerce, I’m only doing this course so that jobs (eg financial analyst/ investment banking) could be open to me; while some subjects (eg Microeconomics) are interesting, many others are quite boring and I’m not at all confident about getting a 90+ average; with some work, I think it’s more reasonable for me to expect an average of ~80 in those subjects. Would that impact negatively on how MIT would view my application, if I had (by MIT’s standards) not-so-impressive marks in Commerce?
When the time comes, I’ll have a look at what research being done at MIT, but I highly doubt that will change my decision to hope for admission; I think it’s very unlikely that I am solely interested in some area of research, which MIT isn’t top-notch in.