My D has all of a sudden, as a rising senior in college, decided that she may want to pursue a PhD in Math. She is currently an applied math major with minors in Data Analysis and CS. She has very little time to prep for the GRE and the GRE subject test. The GRE is easy for her but the Math subject test is not. Are there PhD programs that dont requirement the Math subject test? If so, how do I find out about them?
@Dungareedoll - In most areas, the GRE is offered daily, so she can focus on the Math subject matter test and then take the GRE, especially if she expects to do well on it. The subject tests are only offered twice before most PhD applications are due: September 15, 2018 and October 27, 2018. I suspect that most solid Math PhD programs will required the subject test. If she can otherwise qualify for a top program, she should not limit her options by avoiding the test.
I don’t know any resource that will tell you whether universities will require the subject test. I suggest that you and your daughter narrow her list down to 20-30 schools and then check each schools web site for its admission requirements.
From some brief googling, it looks like there are well-known PhD programs that don’t require the subject GRE (Northwestern, Drexel, Minnesota, Notre Dame came up in the first page of results). There are also different requirements for applied math vs. pure math. Canadian and UK schools don’t require GREs though they tend to only accept outstanding candidates without MS degrees.
That being said, most departments highly recommend it even if it’s not required. Some schools say that the absence of a subject GRE is only offset by superb recommendation letter or compelling evidence of research potential.
Keep in mind that if your daughter decides to go ahead and take the subject GRE, it’s not widely offered - if you live outside of large urban areas, you might have to travel pretty far to take it.
btw: she doesn’t have to apply this fall. She can graduate, get a job – preferably, research-oriented – and apply next year, or even the year after.
First off, thank you all for your replies. Very helpful.
Bluebayou: you said she could get a job in research. how would she go about doing that?
My D, currently a 3rd year PhD student, didn’t take any GRE subject test. Her field is theory of computation, which is “computer science” but her research and her papers published so far have been more math than computer science.
She applied to 10 top-10 universities in CS (MIT, CalTech, UCB, CMU, UoW,… ) and admitted to 5. None of the schools she applied to required GRE subject test.
First stop for advice is her current math professors…Dept Chair…and summer is a great time to reach out to these busy folks.
For Physics, my kid lucked into a website that showed something like the top 150 ranked Physics PhD programs where it was easy to see the requirements for each program. No idea if something like that exists for math, though.