freudian

UC Berkeley :-)

I think a lot has to do with who you're competing against. For example, at least where I'm coming from, a lot of the stronger students tend to want to go into number theory, algebraic geometry, topology, etc. I would guess that most of the top students intend to go into one of these more glamorous subjects, but if they only accepted these students then the analysts, combinatorists, etc. would have nobody to teach. So if suspect that if you state an intention to concentrate in a less sexy subject you will have an easier time getting in to top schools (I am pretty certain that was the case for yours truly).

I just called them; award notifications will be going out early next week, not today :-(

Friday April 9th, 5:22 pm

Not really. The only "research" I did was an REU this past summer; I learned a lot, but I didn't get any new results or publish a paper. I did get a very strong recommendation from my REU advisor (not such a well known professor, by the way) - in his words, "everyone exaggerates a little." My other recommendations were from pretty well-known professors and were probably OK but not amazing, one regret I have about my undergrad career is that I didn't spend enough time "getting to know" professors (I'm terrified of a lot of them). I have a 3.89 GPA, 3.95 in the math department (which mostly gives out A's and A-'s); I took enough classes to get a solid background, but not so many that I drove myself crazy. I got a 850 on the math GRE, which probably didn't hurt. I didn't take any grad classes, but I did take some somewhat advanced classes in my field. I think my statement of purpose was pretty good and showed that I had some clue what is going on in the field (and at Stanford) and what grad school is about (I mentioned that I was excited to teach . . .). I get the impression that it's mostly about being an American citizen, going to a very good school for undergrad and having solid coursework. I think they do want to see a decent score on the GRE, and a lot of it probably comes down to how your research interests align with faculty and how you compare with other students with the same interests (they can't accept 15 people who want to do the same thing). In any case I don't think I'm a superstar, so hopefully this is encouraging for people who are intimidated by those with 3+ years of research and 5 publications :-).

Yikes! Thanks for the paranoia; guess I'll have nightmares tonight ;-).

I just got an email on Thursday saying I've been accepted to Stanford (Dec 8th deadline), but it's so early that I can't shake the feeling that it's some kind of cruel joke. In any case, it does seem like the decision process is fairly haphazard at best: they'll accept some people fairly early, then see what happens with that group (they encourage you to let them know as quickly as possible where else you got accepted, whether you're likely to go, etc.), then send out some more acceptances, etc. I think the rejections for people who are at least somewhat qualified can come fairly late (once they're sure they'll have enough matriculations) or not at all (unless you call up and ask), which seems like it can be something of a nightmare (no news is bad news, only much less decisive). In any case, looking at the results from last year I'm pretty sure there's really no reason to start worrying until around late February.