The Lowly Mathematician

You can see all the various sites I’ve bookmarked about Gradschool @:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/jfredett/gradschool

It’s an RSS feed, but also the only sane url-link to the specific tag. It’s just my del.icio.us space under the tag “gradschool”

So, I know my posts are quite sparse to begin with, and sporadic at that. But, sadly, I’m here to tell you, my faithful and equally sporadic readers, that problem will be getting worse.

Heres my situation, I transferred last year from one school (WPI) to another, cheaper school (WSC)[1]. In doing so, two things happened.

1. I had to redo a fair deal of work. Many credits didn’t transfer, weren’t applicable, or became electives due to requirement differences
2. I suffered a bit of a blow to my now fragile GPA, I’ve had 10 classes so far, and due to the rapid change of material and teaching style, as well as the new stresses and frustrations of repeating much of what I already knew, or taking classes I had no interest in, I did not do very well in most of them. My GPA is a pitiful 2.6… (I got a fuckload of C’s.)

Now, fortunately, I have good grades in my Core courses, most of the outliers (Philosophy excepted, I am stunningly good at that, it seems) are the ones that caused the brunt of the average-destruction. My hope is to pull these grades up with all my vigor. I have calculated that — in the 10-12 classes I have left, I need to get consisent B’s and B+’s to recover to a “safe” 3.2 or so (what I had when I left WPI). The various websites I’ve read say that this is a good average, and combined with me doing un-fucking-believable on the GRE’s, I should be able to get into a decent grad school.

I’ll try to keep Lowlymath.net[2] updated with my adventures in grad school application, and hopefully it will be a resource to anyone else hunting for graduate education.

No little thing like a bad GPA will keep me down, if necessary, I’ll take every math class WSC, WPI, and the rest of the consortium[3] offers to pull up my grade! Someday you’ll all be able to say “Whatsup Doc?” to me, and I will be quite pleased about it!

/Joe

[1] Thats Worcester Polytechnical Institute and Worcester State College, respectively.

[2] I’m actually posting to both blogs at once right now, so the Lowlymath Readers can just mentally replace “Lowlymath.net” with “this blog”

[3] The Consortium is a group of 6 schools which allow for “easy” crossregistration of classes and (supposedly) “easy” transfers between institutions. Though the latter is somewhat of a misrepresentation, given my experience.