What path should I take to get into MIT’s graduate programme for mathematics?
November 23rd, 2010 | 
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Hi and welcome to my blog,
I opened this blog to help anyone who is preparing for his GRE exam.
I remember myself when I started - I was so lost and in such a panic.
Luckily I got this great Gre guide that helped me a lot
So study hard and good luck!
I chose to attend BYU, Provo, for my undergraduate studies and will start in the fall of this year (2008). (As a member of the LDS Church, I do intend to serve a full-time mission for two years when I turn nineteen, which will be in August 2009, after the first year of college.) I have chosen to pursue a double major in mathematics and Chinese, but, of course, that can easily be changed. Getting into MIT’s graduate mathematics programme is a major goal for me, and I was wondering what besides a 4.0 and perfect or near-perfect GRE scores would be necessary to increase my chances of getting in as much as possible. I’ve heard something of a Putnam test. What competitions can I participate in as an undergraduate mathematics major? Also, how do undergraduate assistantships work? I’ve heard that’s how you get good letters of recommendation, but I have no idea what they are or how they work. Any advice would be extremely appreciated. Thank you so much for reading this!
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Clearly, you should take as many upper level math courses as feasible and include a year of analysis and a year of abstract algebra in your curriculum. Yes, the Putnam Exam is the most recognized national mathematics competition. Some schools have problem sessions to prepare for it. The mathematical contest in modeling is a major applied math competition:
http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/
Students work on the problems for a couple of days in teams and each school can only sponsor a handful of teams, so you’d need to ask the math department about organizing or trying out for a team to participate.
Most schools have undergraduate research programs which allow undergrads to do research for pay or for course credit. Look on BYU’s website or ask someone in the math department about undergraduate research opportunities. The NSF REU program also provides opportunities to do research for pay over the summer:
http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/reu_search.cfm
MIT has a very good program, but you should also look into other schools. There are other math programs that are just as good.
Lastly, if you have small amounts of time to do something math related during your mission (You could even do some Putnam exam practice problems among other things
http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/putnamindex.shtml
), it would probably help. The returned missionaries in my math classes complained that they forgot a lot of mathematics during their mission.