Hi. I've been reading this board and reddit about grad school results, and I've been getting more and more nervous by the day ...
Anyway, here are my specs. They're below-average ...
Undergrad institution: Top 25 private university
Graduation date: Sept 2012
Majors: math, physics (double major, no joint major offered at my school)
Minors: None
GPA: 3.3
GRE General: 161 V, 168 Q, 4.0 W
GRE Math: 670
Research: Small funded project, did not result in publication
Other: Took four grad courses (3 math, 1 physics)
Applying for: Applied math, computational/numerical physics
So my story is, I messed up. By the time I was a senior I knew my academic record wasn't good enough to seriously consider grad school. Besides, I didn't know if that was what I wanted to do. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my degree. I thought I should at least apply though, so one day I signed up for the next GRE session available and went in without knowing what the test was about. I didn't know there was a written portion and spent I think 15 minutes on it before skipping ahead. As for the math GRE, it was too late for normal registration and I was on standby. Again, no research, no prior studying, didn't expect to actually take it. So I didn't really do well on it either. As for everything else, my grades were lacking, I didn't know any faculty, I pretty much failed to complete a research project ... Basically, I had everything available and I didn't take advantage of any of it. My undergraduate career was a plane losing altitude and it finally crashed the second half of my last semester when I failed to graduate. Luckily, it was a relatively easy (but extremely stressful) process to rectify and I graduated after the summer session. So it wasn't a surprise when I didn't get into any of the schools I applied to (UW Madison, UMinnesota, McGill, UBC Vancouver, CUNY, SUNY Stony Brook, all for PhD math).
There was one thing, however. A small state school reached out to me and offered me a place in their MS applied math program with a stipend. However, given the shitstorm I was in, I didn't take it.
After graduation, I taught math at a high school through a special program that hired temporary teachers/tutors. After a year, I went into IT. And now I have an idea of what I want to do for a living: I learned SQL and Excel/VBA at my job and found out I'm pretty good at working with databases, my undergrad research was applied math, and I probably spent the bulk of my undergraduate years (or at least the portion I spent doing schoolwork) learning Matlab, Python, and C on my own so I could do problems for the courses I had no place signing up for. All things considered, I think applied math is something I could do and would be happy doing. So I started reaching out to professors from various universities to discuss my options, their areas of expertise, new/impending research that might suit a new grad student, etc. I especially focused on the program that reached out to me two years ago.
I haven't heard back from anywhere yet, but I'm really hoping I get into that MS applied math program. I'm already nervous and the deadline for it is April! I don't know how long I'm gonna last ...
Anyway, that's my rant. Thanks for listening ...