I know that professor’s recommendation, research experience, internship experience, GPA and GRE and the reputation of undergraduate school in the particular field are very important for applying to grad schools, but I’m wondering whether those will vary depends on the field I’m entering. I’m planning to go to a grad school and study financial math or actuarial or data science, which looks more career-oriented. So for those fields will some of the criteria weigh more than others? For example, will internship weigh more than research experience?
I’m going to undergraduate school this year and now selecting which university or college to go between Colgate and UIUC. My concern is that :
Students in Colgate will indeed have stronger relationship with professors, but the math major in UIUC seems stronger and the professors in UIUC math major are a bit more prestigious, though I might not have many chance communicate with them.
Also, in the math field UIUC seems to have higher reputation than Colgate, but Colgate is a LAC and students in LAC usually have greater advantage in applying to graduate schools.
If internship is more important for my target fields, a Colgate math student told me that it is not easy to find a good internship for math students at Colgate, though it has a quite good career service center that can help students to find some. However UIUC seems to have better chances for internship for math students, especially in finance area. Colgate will have some good summer research opportunities, but I don’t know how important that is compare to internship.
So can someone tell me what is more important for the fields such as financial math and actuarial, that are somehow career-oriented?
For the purposes of choosing a college, I don’t think you should worry about this. You can go to a good graduate school in these fields from either Colgate or UIUC - so as long as they both have the coursework you need/want to prepare for the programs, you should choose based on other factors like which one you personally prefer. They’re quite different settings. (That said, UIUC is a Center for Actuarial Excellence, so if you were leaning strongly towards actuarial studies that might be something to consider. Colgate doesn’t have specific explicit coursework in actuarial science…but that’s okay, because most actuaries actually didn’t major in actuarial science anyway.)
This is not true.
I don’t think it’s so black and white - I think it kind of depends on the quality of the experience itself. Generally speaking, though, I think professional programs do tend to prefer internship experience to research experience. I’d dig a little deeper on the Colgate front though rather than take the word of one specific Colgate student.
Thank you juillet! I have another question: for professional graduate programs, is it better to study in a professional major such actuarial science or major in some general areas such as math and economics in undergrad?
I think one difference between the two will be class sizes and how much personal interaction you will have with your professors. At UIUC, you will be in large classes for math and related classes and won’t be interacting much with the math profs until your last year or two. At Colgate, you will have smaller class sizes from the beginning.
@lalalala233 Doesn’t matter for graduate programs, as long as you have the prerequisite classes they want you to have. Lots of math and statistics majors have gone on to get master’s in actuarial science or finance.