Blog, by category: gradschoolfrom the desk of travis johnson.
Northwestern University (from 2009/04/19)I finally committed to graduate school a few weeks ago. I'll be headed to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL for the Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics department. I really enjoyed both the visit at University of North Carolina and Northwestern the week before last. But I think I could like Chicagoland quite a lot, so I guess that's where I'm headed! Mission Graduate School: Success (from 2009/02/25)I've officially been accepted to two PhD applied math programs: Northwestern and University of North Carolina. I've also been accepted to the Masters of Science program at the University of Washington. Both of the PhD offers came with full fellowship offers(at least for the first year), which basically means that I just need to go and give them the best bang for their buck with my brainpower for five years, and then I'll have my PhD. Awesome. All three schools are outstanding and have amazing faculty, as best as I can tell. Professor Kutz has recommended I take some Dynamical Systems(AMATH575, spring quarter) and the Advanced Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations course(AMATH568, summer quarter in some special way). They're both fairly intimidating courses, but it'd be a great confidence boost for next fall, no matter where I ended up, assuming that I lived through the experience. Though, honestly, looking through the previous year's, I think I'm up for it. I have also booked my tickets to visit both University of North Carolina and Northwestern University. I'll be visiting NU March 15 through 17, and UNC March 19 through 21. I could not be more excited! Graduate School Applications and Microsoft (from 2009/02/09)I finally finished graduate school applications last weekend. I applied to University of Washington, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Colorado, and University of Nevada. It's a lot of work getting a bunch of applications out like that: I definitely underestimated it. Hopefully my personal statement measured up to the letters of recommendation that people wrote for me. I also ended up having an interview with Microsoft that week, just to add a bit to the stress there. It actually went fairly well, though I haven't heard back on the round-two interview yet. They said it would be a while though. This is going to be another busy week: Comp Sci, German, Math, and Applied Math homework; Comp Sci exam, and research meetings, along with the standard course assistant for AMATH301 stuff. I also need one more class for spring quarter. Currently I'm planning on the intro CAD class for my last 4 VLPA credits, Real Analysis to round out my applied-math education with some pure-math, and a AMATH500 seminar about high performance computing and visualization(which will be taught by Randall J LeVeque and sounds awesome.) Which leaves me at around 8 credits. I've been encouraged to take introductory accounting, a dance class, and probably a lot more… but I'm not too sure yet. It's kinda too bad that the intro electrical engineering class sounds like kindof a GPA-murderer, because I've always sorta been interested in that sort of thing. Graduate School Applications (from 2009/01/02)I am finally getting around to starting my graduate school applications.. and overall having a lot of fun with them. The places I'm applying to are:
The UW has apparently gotten my full GRE scores, because they are now reporting them through the unofficial transcript interface. I don't quite recall where I sent them already.. I'll probably get that going soon. |