Hi, I am new to the group. I was wondering where my child should apply if he took BC Calculus in 7th grade. He has proceeded to take nine additional college level Mathematics courses at Universities such as NJIT and Rutgers. He is currently taking two 400 level courses, which will bring him up to 11 University mathematics courses by the time the summer is over. At the end of his junior year, he will essentially have completed an undergraduate major in Mathematics. However, that being said, he does not have straight A’s in his High School classes. He has several B’s in Language Arts, French, and some other classes. Will he be able to get into a University with a strong mathematics drpartment?
Are finances an issue? The UK system is great for really pointy kids, and the non-math grades won’t be an issue. @Twoin18 did math at Cambridge and @HazeGrey 's son is doing math + compsci at Oxford, and they can talk more about it, but your son could look at the STEP (Cambridge) or the MAT (Oxford) (part of the admission process) and see what he thinks.
http://www.admissionstesting.org/for-test-takers/step/preparing-for-step/
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/study-here/undergraduate-study/maths-admissions-test
He could get into a lot of state universities, and many have good math departments. He probably is a kid who should go to a college with graduate math programs, as he likely would exhaust the undergrad curriculum pretty quickly.
Thanks for your response! I know that the UK is great for pointy kids. However, my son is terrified to go on a plane (he has a true phobia), let alone another country. I think we need to stick to the East Coast, unfortunately.
Yes, I agree. He needs to go to a University. He has exhausted most undergraduate mathematics courses already.
Do you think NYU would be too much of a stretch?
I’m sure his professors at NJIT and Rutgers have suggestions on a path for him to follow.
He is clearly supremely gifted if he is in 400 level classes as a junior. I would agree I’m sure his professors have a much better scope of where he should head of too.
There are a few kids throughout the years between 12-15 who have enrolled at UC-Berkeley. Many of them are math majors.
And Berkeley is a plane ride away.
Agree that 1) a university is a must for him to have grad level math classes available and 2) the professors he has taken classes with already might be able to help guide him.
I would also suggest that your S try to: 1) look at online course catalogs to see what math classes the college offers and 2) perhaps reach out to the head of the math department of schools he is considering just to be sure he will be able to take grad level math classes as an undergrad. He might also want to confirm that the classes he has taken will be accepted by the university he attends.
Can you pay for NYU? Financial aid isn’t going to be very good there.
It helps to have more detail about what his goals are and priorities in choosing a college. For example, you didn’t mention what types of careers he is considering after college. Does he want to major in mathematics? Does he want to be able to skip over the courses he has taken so far instead of repeating everything again, focusing on graduate math (requiring a college that offers graduate math courses)? Is he uncertain about what he wants to pursue in college, perhaps considering other fields like engineering as well? What is he looking for in a college besides a strong math department?
Colleges that accept a lot of transfer students are probably more likely to give credit for the previous courses taken at NJIT and Rutgers. Rutgers would obviously be likely to give credit for Rutgers courses, and it also has a strong math department.
When I was applying to college quite a few years ago, I had some similarities with your son, although a less extreme version. I also took quite a few math classes at a nearby university beyond HS level, as well as some science classes and electives. While an upperclassmen in HS, I was a half time student at university. And I had the same relative weakness in LA and Spanish, sometimes getting B’s… not taking the highest level offered at my HS in either. I was accepted to Stanford, MIT, and Ivies. I chose Stanford where I was able to skip over the math courses I took in HS and start at a higher level, which had both advantages and disadvantages. Skipping saved a lot of time and offered flexibility to more easily pursue co-terminal masters degrees and graduate faster than expected, but the math classes at Stanford were not equivalent to the corresponding ones I had taken at SUNY, so I would have learned the material better had I repeated. I ended up pursuing engineering, which was my original plan during HS.
MIT comes to mind for your son I would actually avoid the Ivies in his case since there would be more of a liberal arts focus including the language arts, etc. Having said that if he found one that he liked (there are several highly rated in the math department), I wouldn’t deter him either. Personally I wouldn’t skip over the math courses if he did get into a place like MIT, I would encourage him to take the honors courses.
Places like UChicago and Columbia (both have excellent math depts.) would be out if he wanted to stay away from a core curriculum which would involve the social sciences, humanities, etc., but it depends on the education he wants to get. Those core curriculums would broaden his education quite a bit but if they hold no interest then he might not like taking the courses and accomplishing the amount of reading/writing that comes with it. Personally I would take the broad undergraduate education over specialization simply due to the fact that is what Masters and PhD’s are for.
Consider Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Princeton University in New Jersey.
If he wants to be rich, consider a degree in finance from NYU Stern or from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the same vein as UK schools but without the ocean crossing, you might look at some U’s in Eastern Canada. Waterloo in particular recruits pointy math students, and U of Toronto is a top math school too.
The Putnam rankings are one proxy for particular strength in math, although I’m sure there must be many excellent programs that don’t emphasize this competitive aspect.https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/putnam-competition-individual-and-team-winners Of US schools that appear there, CMU and RPI are probably particularly “pointy-friendly.”
McGill or u Toronto. John Hopkins and cmu. Rensselaer
MIT requires 8 courses humanities and social sciences classes, as well as 4 courses in communication classes that require at least “20 pages of writing.” In contrast, some Ivies require far less. For example, Brown appears to only require a single writing class beyond the major requirements.
An advantage to places like MIT (by no means a slam dunk in admissions for a pointy kid with a good number of B’s) would be a higher concentration of other math-focused kids. For example, if he is in to math contests, MIT considers them in admissions decisions to a greater degree than most colleges, and has a lot of kids interested in pursuing math contests while in college… perhaps more than any other US college. The news story at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527971/taking-the-putnam/ shows the scores of MIT students taking the Putnam exam fill up the entire gym, and MIT supports coaches and varies other exam related activities. At other colleges, students often get little support and have few fellow students taking the exam. MIT sometimes gets >30% of the top 100 scorers on the Putnam math competition and wins more often than any other colleges.
@Gildalisa, your son is clearly way to the far end of the Bell curve in math, even by gifted standards. He has a rare ability that needs to be nurtured and supported in a university environment where he will thrive.
MIT does come to mind (Caltech too, but it’s obviously a plane ride away) as a possible destination that might be attracted to your son’s pointiness and where he would certainly find opportunities to be challenged.
Is your son going into his junior year, or is he a rising senior? It’s not clear from your OP. If a junior, MIT has a math research program called PRIMES-USA (an offshoot of the PRIMES program, which was for Boston-based kids; the PRIMES-USA one allows for distance-based research mentoring), that runs from January of Junior Year to December of Senior Year. If your son is a rising Junior, he should certainly apply. I believe about 50% of PRIMES/PRIMES-USA students end up at MIT.
http://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/usa/index.php
Regardless, you should get in touch with the people there, who are highly committed to mathematics education and research for gifted youth. Slava Gerovich is the program director, Pavel Etingof is a MIT math professor and chief research advisor, and Tanya Khovanova is the head mentor, and a huge advocate for gifted young math students. You can PM me for contact info (which is also readily available online from the websites).
MIT PRIMES has also collaborated with the Art of Problem Solving, a math education company started by Richard Rusczyk, a form USA Math Olympiad winner and Princeton graduate. He would also be a good person to contact. I don’t know how to get to him directly, but an inquiry to artofproblemsolving with some information about your son’s background would probably be a good place to start.
I think that people such as these would be better able to advise you. Given your son’s exceptional math ability, I think he deserves to be guided by people who are among the best in the field in this area.
Good luck!
I think you need to be very very careful about your sons direction. My kid also took calculus BC in seventh grade and followed it up with around 15 to 20 more college level math classes in high school. They majored in math in college but decided the math field just wasn’t for them and are going to grad school in a different field. At their college they were not the brightest math student. One boy was just incredible. He is going to grad school in an economics related field not math. If you want to PM me feel free to do so. It is not an easy decision and he may not stay with math