<p>Are the opportunities to perform lab work very different from HS to HS?
Are a large percentage of these tippy top HS scientists doing research in labs off campus???</p>
<p>
You listed Zare as someone supportive of your position. I don’t read it exactly that way. And apparently neither do you because you disagree with him on what I see as the major premise of his article. I see him saying these are excellent students but missing a practical component of their education because of this obsession with standardized testing. That could also apply to excellent, obviously technically qualified students.</p>
<p>Ok…so there are some students at these schools that seem to be not as qualified, and may struggle. These student are fulfilling some institutional need so I’m willing to give them a pass. But, in this time of holistic admissions, are math (and science) prodigies having trouble finding programs in this country that meets their needs. I don’t know enough about the top Math/Science programs to judge. </p>
<p>Once you get outside of the colleges we all talk about is the next level down “good enough”. I’m not talking prestige, I’m talking professors, classes and fellow students at the same level.</p>
<p>“Are the opportunities to perform lab work very different from HS to HS?”</p>
<p>No, performersmom, they are all exactly the same. The rural high school in North Dakota and the high school in Watts have exactly the same opportunities as Harvard-Westlake, Short Hills, the IL Math and Science academy, and Exeter.</p>
<p>(I think you knew the answer already!)</p>
<p>Here’s a world renowned physics grad from my alma mater -</p>
<p>[Mike</a> Judge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Judge]Mike”>Mike Judge - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I believe he is known for the Beavis theory of gravitation - “This video sucks!”.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>This all boils down to - whatever MY kid does well in, should be the guaranteed admissions criteria for his first choice college. Well, life doesn’t work that way.</p>
<p>Oh soomoo, REALLY now. No, once you get below MIT there’s no challenge to be found, anywhere. It’s like asking them to go back to 1 + 1 = 2 again. The kids are all stupid and the poor geniuses will just yawn all day long</p>
<p>I, too, LOL at the assertion that MIT is somehow the end all for math prodigies. Clearly Harvard, Yale, Duke, and the like are community colleges of the last degree. ;)</p>
<p>PG</p>
<p>I wasn’t talking about just MIT, I was also talking about its “math peers”. And I asked the question seriously. Is there a huge difference in these math programs once you get beyond the top 10 schools known for math? I am talking about for math prodigies, not your run of the mill math majors. Maybe the answer is “no”, but just because you say it’s no, I’m not going to believe it. I would like someone more knowledgeable (and maybe a bit less snarky) to weigh in on the subject.</p>
<p>I wrote about the issue of places for top math students in post #1392 et seq. There are a number of alternatives to MIT, of course. For a truly top math student looking for alternatives, I think the deciding criterion for the student is: Would the first math course to be taken, as an incoming freshman, logically be a graduate course or an undergraduate course? If it would be a graduate course, I wouldn’t advise the student to go to that university. There are a lot of state flagships (and in California, UC’s that aren’t Berkeley) where a very talented student could find a sensible-level undergraduate course. However, there are some places where the logical course truly would be a graduate course. I think those would not be good fits.</p>
<p>I wanted to return to the idea mentioned by performersmom, in post #1419, regarding “dweebie/one-dimensional geniuses.” This is not as pernicious as many other stereotypes, but it is still a stereotype–not attributing the stereotype to performersmom, but you will encounter it. </p>
<p>In my experience, there are very few really dweebie mathematicians and scientists. It is possible that I am so deeply enmeshed in dweebitude that I can no longer recognize it. On the other hand, I don’t know any jokes with the punch-line “a spherical Bessel function!” (Oh, wait . . . )</p>
<p>I think my posts on this thread are probably the high-water mark of my dweebitude, outside of a scientific setting.</p>
<p>Just wanted to add: I think a student could acquire the lab skills that Zare hoped to see by working with Erector sets, Lego robotics kits, home electronics kits, household repairs, and tinkering with automobiles. (Radio repair, a la Feynman, is no longer a realistic possibility, though.) Most of these things are available anywhere there is a Radio Shack and a Toys R Us. The Lego robotics kits might have to be purchased on Amazon or Ebay.</p>
<p>Here’s to a dweeb with a good sense of humor and patience for non-dweebs like moi, then!!! (wink)
Thanks for your understanding that I do NOT buy into the stereotype, but that it is a facile reference and sometime seriously used one, though not by me.
However, since AdComms purport to be looking for “interesting” candidates, who knows how a Math prodigy might come off… If he or she does not have another strong passion, leadership, etc., which is totally possible, that he/she is a Math noodler with lots of great ideas and talents and accomplishments, but primarily related to Math, which is basically self-referential, as was said above.
Is it important for a 17 yr old Math prodigy to already be thinking about or even working with applications to the real world? Would a Math college prof be happy teaching 17 year olds with just plain amazing brain power and some lab experience, period?</p>
<p>At the broader tippy tops (HYPS and so forth), what percentage of a class falls into the Mathie category??</p>
<p>I do find it fascinating, all this.
I think that QM, you did not answer the Q really being asked by soomoo- are the PEERS going to be significantly/detrimentally different the further you get from MIT?</p>
<p>How do the TEchs (Caltech, GT, etc etc) fit into the Math world??</p>
<p>Quick addendum: I was citing Zare just as an example of a scientist who complained publicly about the undergraduates, and not really in support of my particular view. As mentioned, I don’t precisely agree with him on the diagnosis of the issue (at Stanford)-- although I am happy to acknowledge the flaws in standardized tests, and I have a real issue with the testing mania that swept the country in the wake of “No Child Left Behind.” I do think NCLB was well-intentioned originally, though.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I did all those things as a kid. I still remember my erector set robot which was basically a skyscraper of metal with a little electric motor in the bottom driving a pulley. Plus ham radio, chemistry set (with an experiment to “turn water into wine” that my parents thought was a sacrilege), microscope, bug collection, whatever. </p>
<p>None of that really helped much in my first college chem lab - we were given an unkonwn to analyze experimentally and half our grade dependined on getting the correct number for some characeristic of that compound which we entered on a single punch card and submitted to the computer lab (it was the 70s). I could answer all the questons on the process, write a stellar report, but getting the correct answer, within some tolerance, that was always elusive to me. Maybe you just need a knack for such things.</p>
<p>
Again, I don’t see him as complaining about particular undergraduates and claiming they shouldn’t be there - that they were admissions mistakes. I see him complaining about a single facet of their high school preparation.</p>
<p>To performersmom #1432: First, thanks!</p>
<p>To answer the question about the hypothetical student’s peers: I think the number of close peers probably tends to drop off the further you get from MIT, until it reaches zero (more or less) at some university.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician, and definitely don’t know much about mathematics at various universities (!), although we do get the Monthly Notices of the American Mathematical Society at home. </p>
<p>Caltech has a freshman honors math course that covers Galois theory, a topic in abstract algebra. Plenty deep. Probably plenty deep even for those few who have already encountered it, but not really mastered it. I don’t really know about the program at Georgia Tech, though I have a high opinion of the school overall.</p>
<p>^^^
I believe we’ve discussed this before QM, but didn’t Feynman lament that his famous lectures in Physics prepared very few of his students at Caltech (Freshmen and Sophmores) to pass his exams? And that the students who could pass the exams were extremely few in number, and could probably have learned most of that stuff on their own anyway?</p>
<p>Yeah, I just looked in the preface to the lectures - he quotes “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy disposiitons where it is almost superfluous”. It’s from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I think I probably posted this before too because I like it so much.</p>
<p>I guess this actually supports your point of view, although it’s about 50 years old and he is talking about the great majority of studnets being unprepared for his lectures.</p>
<p>Well, as a math major myself, in a program that gave us graduate math training at an undergrad level, I thank my lucky stars that I was never such a prodigy that I couldn’t have benefited from any one of a number of excellent colleges and universities. How dreary to have no place to go and no one to learn from once a precious few are eliminated from the game. I always thought that smart people were humble enough to learn from anybody, but boy have I been schooled. Glad my kids aren’t prodigies in their fields of interest either. How depressing to be so superior that only one or two colleges will “do,” and that they apparently owe you admission for the mere fact of your greatness.</p>
<p>To bovertine, #1434: Some of my chemistry colleagues subscribe to the idea of “magic hands,” though I don’t. I dislike the aspect of lab courses that a student tends to be graded on accuracy or % yield the first time she/he has ever encountered the procedure in question–that seems a bit off, pedagogically.</p>
<p>There are a few tricks of the trade, but chemistry is pretty deterministic–or at least, it ought to be.</p>
<p>We had an undergraduate organic lab course in my department, where some fraction of the students inexplicably could not get their first synthesis to work. I even had an advisee who dropped the course for that reason. A few years later, the person running the labs realized that the students who couldn’t get the (multi-day, multi-lab) synthesis to work had lab drawers with the greatest sun exposure, and highest temperature. Mystery solved! I think they should have retroactively corrected the enrollment/grade issues for the affected students.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I am making no claim to be in the league of the math students I am writing about. This is not a display of modesty, just fact. </p>
<p>From observations, I think a student can do well starting in actual graduate courses (as opposed to undergraduate courses that cover graduate level material) as a sophomore; but given all of the adjustments involved, it tends to be very difficult for an incoming freshman. That does limit the choice of universities, somewhat, for a small number of people.</p>
<p>And yes, to bovertine, #1436–Feynman seems to take elitism to the extreme in the introduction to the books on his lecture series. I have read that the audience for the course started out with freshmen and sophomores, and wound up consisting largely of post-docs and other faculty. A lot of people really loved Feynman, despite that.</p>
<p>Quant, I very much agree with your line of thought concerning departments being responsible for admissions rather than the general admissions office-I think you would get a very different class particularly in science and engineering.
Another anecdotal piece of evidence-we were at an admissions meeting of one of the HYPS schools and someone asked why they had added an additional SAT subject test in science for those interested in the sciences and engineering, and they said it was because the science and engineering departments were not happy with the overall quality of students they were getting and because some students with little math background thought it would be interesting to try their hand at engineering which rarely worked out well.</p>