Recent content by shravas

Actually, after hearing stories from friends it might be best for you to wait until fall 2012 before taking any year-long sequences (I don't actually go to OSU but a lot of my friends do and I took a few classes there a couple years ago). It sounds as if the transition to semesters is pretty messy.

I'm not sure how easy it will be for you to do this, but you might want to try taking 547, which is offered in the winter, and the courses that follow. I'm pretty sure that it's equivalent to the 191 sequence, except intended for upperclassman rather than freshman. Also, OSU is switching to...

This obsession with doing whatever it takes to get into the top schools is mostly limited to certain segments of the population, probably skewed towards people that live in the northeast and are upper-middle class. I went to an average public school, and no one really outwardly worried about...

Transfer admissions to the top US universities is really hard, and probably even harder if you're international. And even if you take a gap year, admissions will still be hard, especially since you're an international student. Waterloo and University of Toronto are both really good schools...

Does anyone know of any summer school-type things like the one at Princeton (http://www.math.princeton.edu/rtg/summer/)? I'm not really sure where to look for them.

I heard from someone who got rejected but made it to the shortlist that all spots were filled by Sunday night.

Does anyone know anything about the REU University of Minnesota at Minneapolis?

This is absolutely false. If you look at the Common Data Set for MIT (http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2010/c.html) they say explicitly that grades are more important than essays. I wouldn't worry about a C your sophomore year though, especially if it's not in a math or science class. There are...

Uhh, this is not true. If anything, they encourage letting students take a year off, giving everyone who accepts an admissions offer the opportunity to take a year or two off before starting at MIT, and there are definitely people here older than average.

I got an REU without really having any of those as a freshman (well, I never saw my recommendations but I'm not sure how much they could have talked about any "research potential" I have).

I think there are usually a considerable amount of sophomores at REUs. In the one I went to last summer, there were 5 sophomores and 2 freshman out of 12 people (though like a few people were also thinking about graduating early?). So it's definitely possible.

I got into an REU as a freshman last summer with single and multi-variable calc (at my school that's just Calc 1 and Calc 2, I'm not sure what Calc 3 is), discrete math and linear algebra. I got A's in all of them, but on my transcript, they were just listed as passing, so I don't remember...

Of course, I just meant that academic standards aren't lowered for athletes like they are at other schools. So being good at sports is just like any other extracurricular. But I don't think they have more teams than any other school anymore though, there were a whole bunch of cuts like two...

MIT does not recruit athletes.

I looked at a few of your other posts but it seems as if you went to a community college before transferring to your school? Sorry if this is offensive to anyone, but that's might a big part of why you are having trouble - depending on your previous classes, you might not have adjusted to the...