Summary: What are the best coping strategies and ways of getting onto a masters program at a good university when I come from a very bad university where the amount of content being taught is extremely low and I will come away with far less (mathematical) knowledge than any of my peers from other universities.
I currently see two ways to proceed from my current predicament:
- Stay at my current university and put up with it.
- Drop-out and apply elsewhere.
What I am most interested in though is whether any of you can see a middle ground between these two extremes which I haven’t considered.
At school I was always academically successful. I studied in the United Kingdom and left with 4A* grades – averaging 98.4% across maths, further maths, physics, chemistry. I applied to the University of Oxford for maths, got through to the final round of selection but had a car-crash of an interview and was rejected. I elected to go to my insurance rather than taking a year out (I didn’t want to wait a whole year or apply again). This insurance was an up-and-coming university (not a famous/old one), but usually features in positions about 5 – 10 in the national league tables for maths. In theory it should be quite a good university.
[tldr – skip the next four paragraphs] However, I do not feel I am learning anything at all here. I am bored out of my mind with the slow pace of the course, everything we’ve done so far is easier than what I’ve done at school, and despite us being set quite a lot of work, it’s mind numbingly repetitive and simple. I’m doing an awful lot of my own wider reading (just as I’ve been doing since age ~13), but no matter how much I do, it’s never going to be enough. Additionally, we spend vast amounts of time repeating the same material multiple times. This university aims for a high quality of teaching – and that means repetition to them, and an inordinate waste of time to me. I’d rather we move onto new material at a fast pace and let me study/figure out the material in my own time. The other problem is that we get a huge amount of module choice. This sounded excellent at first, but really it’s just a way of making us specialise at a really early stage and giving them time to repeat material again and again.
To give a few concrete examples of this, I will not be specialising in probability/statistics beyond my first year as there isn’t time in my timetable (I wish to take on pure and computational modules instead). The first year probability/stats module is so basic that I will end up leaving this university having never covered even the Chi-Squared test. It’s trivially simple to look up online, but it’s everything else I’m not learning and never will.
In other areas, probability has covered basic methods, discrete random variables, expectation, variance, PMF, PGF, and a few other things over an entire term [and not in all that much detail]. Analysis has covered basic methods, convergence, tests for convergence, series and sequences & convergence thereof, a few more tests for convergence, then a little section on infinite limits. Algebra has covered functions (definition, bijectivity, etc.), some basic group theory, rings, fields, etc. along with a little work on matrices. We then studied basic integration repeated from A-Level in a methods course (integration by parts, by substitution, product/quotient rule, finishing up with improper integrals). Is it just me, or is this waaaay less than other universities cover? Further, even the fourth year exam papers look comprehensible. Yes, they contain terms I don’t know, but they don’t really contain any symbols I don’t. By contrast, most mathematical Wikipedia pages are completely baffling to me and way beyond my level. Shouldn’t the fourth year – the MMath year – look similarly unintelligible?
[more background] I came to university because I love maths and work so much that I wanted to be completely immersed in it, able to bat ideas and extra reading material of my peers, and generally realise my dream of being in a place where everyone loves so much that we don’t wish to do anything else. I’m good at problem solving (e.g. I specialise in reverse engineering all of the gory implementation details of Windows Update, and since age 14 I’ve written over 40,000 words on this topic – all of the different error codes, registry locations, security systems, etc. etc.), but I’ve ended up in a place where I don’t feel I am learning anything, the second and third year students said things get a bit harder next year, but I haven’t heard of any particularly difficult jump to come, and my peers are bowing to the pressures of the very large (but trivially simple) workload being set by the university and simply aren’t interested at looking at other areas.
It was my dream to reapply to Oxford and study their MSc Computer Science course: http://ift.tt/1DmH6aI and then continue on in academia (computer science is my true calling; I am studying maths only as a means to the end of theoretical computer science). But how will they ever accept me – even if I get a first (and I fully intend to put in the revision hours to make absolutely sure I do) – when I come knocking on their door with so little working knowledge. I’m intending to study for the MMath degree rather than BSc, but I’m going to come out without anything. Plus it’s hard to keep motivated – although I know I must. Every day is a struggle, and I don’t think a single day has gone past when I haven’t regretted the decision of applying here. All I can keep thinking about is “if only I had done this different, worked harder here, done better there….”
So, the questions:
I’ve spoken to some of my lecturers about this horrendously slow pace of learning but they weren’t able to help very much. There isn’t any extension material available (except in one course where it is supplied to all students, and I’ve done it already). One pointed me to the mathematical Olympiads/STEP exams, but I was really hoping for a bit more than that. My timetable is too full to audit any second year lectures, and I read lecture notes from various other universities already, as much as time is available.
I don’t really see dropping out as an option unfortunately, as much as I desperately want to. We’re self-funding and with my brother starting university soon and my father retiring, the whole extra year’s expense with no guarantee of a place elsewhere, or that it's any better, is too much I think.
I’ve got an option to talk a study year abroad in my third year (anything to get away from this terrible place…..), and although there are no guarantees of getting a place, there is the possibility of a year out in a mid-ranking university in the USA. I’m very tempted to be honest, for all the wrong reasons. Do you think this would help me getting a place in further study back here in the UK? At Oxford? In general, are there any ways of making things better here, and learning more? Do you think I’ve got any chance of getting into Oxford/academia now, or is it all over?
Thank you very much for any help, and I’m sorry that this is so long.
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