Thinking of Grad School?

See the GT Grad School pages Thinking about Grad School.

There are two ways to pursue graduate school, either the PhD, or a Masters.

Masters: Generally two year programs. And recently there have been several more focused programs, in a variety of topics of increasing importance. These include: bioinformatics, quantitative finance, atmospherics, computational and applied mathematics. Of course these courses of studies tend to be quite computational in nature. Be sure to highlight your computing skills.

Georgia Tech offers programs of interest here: Bioinformatics, and quantitative finance.

A starting point is a site hosted by the Sloan Foundation, Sciencemasters.com. They have a list of programs they have sponsored, as well as those that they have not. This site is not wholly inclusive! If you have more suggestions for links, let me know.

Ph.D.: Generally a five year program. With the increased homeland security concerns, there is a strong interest in boosting the number of American PhDs. Currently, there are about 1000 Math PhDs/year, with just about 50% being American.

Each year, the American Mathematical Society publishes an extensive survey of the profession. It includes employment information on the the new PhDs. (5% unemployment for the 2001 new PhDs) as well as salary information. Read the February 2002 report to see how it relates to your interests in math.

Here are the highlights from the report

Doing math research is quite hard. The insights that lead to substantial advances are won only by very hard effort. At the same time, if struggling with math is what you love to do, and you get paid to do it, life is pretty darn good. Mathematical research remains vital, and is central to a great many of the coming technological advances. So collectively we will need people with these sorts of skills. There is a future in it.

Still not sure? And still going to apply for grad school? Go ahead and pursue the PhD. That is where most of the money and the options are.

Georgia Tech offers an array of resources designed specifically for graduate students, including graduate and family housing, the Graduate Co-op Program, the Graduate Student Senate, and many more. For more information, see the Current Graduate Students web site.

For information on admission to the School of Mathematics, see the Graduate Applications for Admission web site.