disclaimer - this post contains a lot of whining.
starting with high school going up until at least after grad school, an unreasonable amount of weight is given to standardized tests. now all of a sudden the tests mean very little. seems rather annoying. in my particular case, i have degrees in math and my only work experience is teaching. last semester i taught 7 classes. this semester i am teaching 8. it goes against the norms of modesty, but i am a pretty good teacher. however, me caring about students doing well and meeting with them outside of office hours for at least 10 hours every week (time that i dont get paid for) plus voluntary review sessions on sunday dont get seen as me taking my job (whatever it happens to be) seriously. of course any exam is no substitute for work experience however, it seems that to get your foot into the door with an internship you should already have had your other foot into the door. i have sent out my resume to 28 banks/firms/companies/hedge funds etc and 19 of them have emailed me back saying i have no prior work experience so i cannot be given an internship. i had an interview with a hedge fund manager today but he called me 3 hours prior to the meeting saying the position had been filled with an sophomore business major from another university. i fail to understand what a second year business major can do in a position that requires extensive use of matlab and numerical methods - a position, that one would assume, a math major who has had a few courses in numerical analysis and has been using matlab for a few year for would be good for. but thats neither here nor there. (just wanted to bitch/moan a little and this place just popped up).
anyhow, at least in a 100 mile radius of where i am no one seems to want to hire a graduate math student. how does one get this work experience then required to get THE work experience necessary to get into a tier 1/2 program? what else does one do in such positions?
re. the suggestions you made to the dept...i hate to sound like a petulant child but i dont understand that part. you mention that you made suggestions for improvement to them without stating what they were. i find this rather unhelpful. a phone call to the director could of course me made but it would be rather foolish to ask him an open ended question, "hey, someone asked you to fix something. what was it and what have you done to fix it?" unless prior conditions are known, how does one compare to see if the situation has improved or stayed the same? i have been up for 2 days now trying to finish grading 8 midterms (drop date is sunday) and working on my time series homework so forgive me if you answered these questions implicitly or otherwise. i have tried calling regarding placement statistics but i get different responses from different people ranging from "we dont keep track of such meaningless statistics" to "oh 97% but we cannot disclose how that number was calculated." perhaps i am not asking the correct questions. a hint here would be much appreciated.
i have studied with students from clemson university and those that graduated from mit with a top 15 putnam finish every year and found the clemson student to be brighter. of course, a good student will flourish regardless of the university or the environment they end up in. however, it is foolish to maintain that a genius from the slums of kenya will have the same opportunities as a not so bright student from south henrietta institute of technology. this is not to say that there arent any bright students at tier 3/4 programs but just that there are very few exceptional ones. those students cannot be made the norm when talking of programs as a whole. if that were the case then rutgers mqf would be better regarded. there are bound to be people who end up, due to extenuating circumstances, at programs that dont seem to match well with their intellect but in my personal opinion (which doesnt count for much here) there arent too many such cases.
i started my undergrad years at a top 10 university in the us but by way of wasting time doing things i shouldnt have been doing (messing with vintage audio gear), i managed to get placed on probation twice and then got suspended from said university. in high school i took 21 ap courses - got 5's on all of them, graduated top of my class a year early (skipped a few grades growing up in india), got a perfect score on the sat's, blah blah blah. greatest nerd resume. however, the first 2 years of my undergraduate program will never leave me alone as they screwed up my gpa pretty horribly. ended up having to go to community college for a semester to come back to good academic standing and then started attending a local university where i have done quite well. a lot of hard work went into getting to the position i am now in but just those 2 years seem enough to condemn me to a lifetime of nonsense. i have worked my way back to the same ethic i had in high school and consider myself fairly competent mathematically despite my failure to get an 800 on the gre general test (have taking the stupid exam 3 times now with 790s all 3 times). having said all this, even if i go in for an interview, most people are turned off just by the fact that i dont go to a top 10 university therefore i much not be as smart. obviously no one has the time to read all this crap but at the same time, not having the big name on my resume prevents them from even investigating my case further. hence the question, "is rutgers good enough to justify a $100k loan?" of course i make what i want of the program and my time there but on the street personal accomplishments sometimes get overshadowed by a resume with a big school name on it.
/back to playing with lyapunov exponents
ps. feel free to whittle away whatever whining deemed unnecessary.