Hello,
I really want to study math at Princeton, but I do not have much competition math experience. My experience with math was mostly through online courses or books about group theory, stochastic processes, differential equations etc.
I also have done a research on chaos dynamics with a master’s student who wrote her thesis on the topic.
My question is that does anyone here know if I have a realistic chance of admissons to Princeton for a math degree without any competition award?
At Princeton you don’t declare your AB major (such as Math) until April of sophomore year. Lots of students, including my son, didn’t have any math competitions on their resume before being admitted to Princeton. So don’t worry about it. Rather, concentrate on developing your whole application.
Thanks, but on princeton supplement I chose math as my first major of interest, and wrote my commonapp essay on how math helped me overcome Tourette’s. That’s why I am concerned that they would expect me to have math competitions.
It’s not competitions. If you’ve done the right research into your target colleges, what they say and show, you won’t find an emphasis on contests.
Otoh, make sure that essay “shows” more than saying how it helped you overcome. They’re looking for more than how you personally overcame a challenge. More what this led to, energies and impact around you.
@lookingforward thanks so much for your help.
Who knows whether the adcoms at Princeton would expect you to have math competitions upon reading how math has helped you overcome Tourette’s. What level math courses have you taken or are taking now and what grades have you earned? What’s your SAT and SATII (assuming you took one in math) scores? If you mention that you’ll major in math, they’ll look at such scores for your proficiency level. Math at Princeton is very tough, by the way. One of my son’s high school friends was admitted to Princeton two years before him, and she had all kinds of math competitions during her K-12 years. At Princeton, she found herself just an average math student. She later changed her major from math to something else.
I know the difficulty of math courses in Princeton. Actually for the last few days, I have been solving the sample questions form Advanced Vector Calculus (MAT203) in Princeton. I am also familiar with doing proofs, which is the most important thing high school curriculums don’t include. I always had very high math scores and taking Discrete Maths and AP Stats in my high school right now.
Then allow those things as “evidences” of your proficiency. Competitions are just another evidences, so I wouldn’t worry that you don’t have any records of these.
Princeton has plenty of Math majors that have never taken part in any Math competitions.
Your experience doing proofs is much more valuable than placing in competitions. My son (BSE '16) placed very highly in math competitions prior to attending Princeton but none of those could have possibly prepared him for the kind of work his closest friend (and math concentrator) at Princeton was doing. To say it is challenging would be a gross understatement! Admissions will be looking for more than stories of overcoming challenges (not that those are insignificant) and your ability to get by in the math department - they will be interested in how you can contribute meaningfully to Princeton both while you are a student, as well as by what you will do after you graduate.
Bottom line - your likelihood of admission depends not on your competition record, but on how well you convinced the admissions people that Princeton cannot get by without offering you a place in their upcoming class.
lol the fact that Princeton has a course called “Advanced Vector Calculus” is just…weird. Sorry, shady comment from a Harvard math alumn ; )
I can attest that Harvard at least had a handful of students who purely had an intellectual interest in math who decided to concentrate in the subject and weren’t necessarily the “math competition” type.
@hgrad2010 “advanced” indicates the “proof-based” nature of the course, I guess
You could go through the course catalog at every university and find ‘shady’ course names. I’d say the main reason is that you have to go through so much bureaucracy to change a course title at most schools and it’s better to give a ‘generic’ title and just change course content as needed.