Tam

This may not be about you. The recommender might be dealing with some kind of illness or family situation. Try to stay calm - this isn't a reflection on the quality of your application or your potential. That said, I hope things work out well for you. Good luck :-)

I don't know anything about your undergraduate school or how good your GPA is, but your GRE scores are just fine - your verbal is plenty high enough for engineering, and of course your math score is good. If you haven't already, you'll want to go to the website of each of the graduate programs you've listed and see what areas they specialize in, and what the funding situation is (assuming that matters) for foreign students. Are you a native English speaker, and is your TOEFL score high enough to be considered for a teaching assistantship? That kind of thing. You might also narrow your list by considering what type of city you want to live in (a small college town vs. a big city like Boston or Chicago, etc.) and other factors like that. Good luck!

I don't have any problem waiving my "rights" here because I don't think I should have that "right" to begin with. If a professor at a school I applied to wanted to call one of my recommenders and have a frank phone call about me, would I think I had a right to a recording of the phone call? Why shouldn't they be allowed to write a confidential letter?

It's hard to figure out. I realize my GRE score is good, and my GPA in recent years is reasonably high, but (a) I go to a school nobody has heard of, and ( my transcript is really raggedy (I've been going to my current school since summer of 2001).

So here's my deal. I want to go to grad school to do pure math, hopefully to get a PhD. I know I can't get into a top program (at all), but I'm not sure exactly how good or bad a candidate I might be for something like a large state school or, well, anywhere. I'm just finishing my bachelor's this year, at 34, at a public 4-year college (not university) that nobody outside of my state will have heard of. I'll have about a 3.6 GPA, higher in math (about 3.9 I think) from this college, but I did flunk out of a Really Good School when I was much younger, so my overall GPA (if we have to count those grades from the 1990s) is about 3.0. Took the GRE, got 720V/780Q. Don't intend to take the math subject exam at all, and I'm not applying to schools that require it (and only to one school that wants it at all). I think my LORs will be good, though of course they are from my professors at Unknown Regional College. I have one published paper, in Computer Science. Neither the paper nor the journal are at all impressive ("Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges"). I have worked full time at a career while going to school part time. My transcript shows a lot of classes that I started and did not finish. The places I'm applying are from about #60 to #110 on the NRC list, and are spread out geographically. Does it sound like I have a decent chance of getting into one of these schools, with funding? I'm planning to apply at about 8 places.

I would seriously, seriously remove the part where you say you didn't like teaching because of the lengthy at-home preparation. Grad school will have way more of that than teaching, so it kind of makes me question whether you will really want to do it. The part about future homes being built on the ocean floor makes you sound like a crazy person on the bus. Space to build more houses really isn't the limiting factor on human population, as far as I'm aware.