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I'm a senior undergrad right at a small liberal arts college right now who is applying to math PhD programs in the U.S. I would like to eventually become a professor at a relatively good university that has a good environment for doing mathematics. But I'm concerned that since the schools I'm applying to are not at the very top, I am basically preventing myself from having that opportunity. For example, some professors at my college suggested that I apply to Univ. of Oregon and Univ. of Georgia, because they have strong faculty in algebra. But I looked at where past doctorate recipients from Oregon went, and they usually end up in small colleges that are pretty unknown. That is making me hesitant about applying to Oregon.

I consider myself a strong student (and so do my letter writers, and I guess that's what really matters) but I have poor math GRE scores that my professors think will severely limit my chances of getting into a program at the top 40 schools (e.g. they said I had a shot at, say, Univ. of Washington, UCLA, Chicago, and Michigan, before I got my GRE scores).

Some of my professors don't think the prestige of the grad school matters that much (i.e. as long as I write an interesting thesis and make my results known, I should be fine). But I have a feeling that my professors may be a bit out of touch, since I go to a liberal arts college, not a research university. And when I look at where past PhD students from good programs (e.g. in the Group I list in the AMS rankings but not top thirty) go to, I get a bit concerned. Maybe I should take a year off and try again next year. I was wondering if anyone had any advice.

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    This question would be more appropriate at academia.SE (currently being proposed but not yet in beta: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16617/academia).2011-12-29
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    Hopefully it would be on topic at academia.SE if/when it exists, but I wonder about the appropriateness of automatic closure for that reason, especially before it exists. There is a relevant meta discussion: http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/2891/questions-about-math-grad-school-and-such2011-12-29
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    That there is no better place to ask this is not a good argument to ask it *here*...2011-12-30
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    @Mariano: I agree with that, and also think that the hypothetical existence (whether actual or not) of another SE site where this question would be on topic does not make it off topic here. (Whether it is on topic may be up for debate. Further discussion would probably be more appropriate on the [meta thread](http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/2891/questions-about-math-grad-school-and-such), where so far as far as I can tell no one has weighed in on the side of such questions being off topic.)2011-12-30
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    This is an awesome question, and in about 10 years I'll probably be able to give you a really good answer. I did not do well on the math GRE's. I had a 3.98 GPA, and got one B in a math class, but all at UCF, a state school in Florida with very little current mathematics going on. I got rec letters from the chair of the math dept., another mathematician that hasn't published in a long time, and a pretty active guy in symplectic geometry. I didn't really know how to apply to grad schools or what I wanted to do(wish I had known to ask someone... hehe) so I applied to CUNY, Vanderbilt, UF...2011-12-31
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    and JHU. But JHU was the only place I got into (at least, with funding, which is all that really matters). Luckily, I turned out to like stable homotopy theory, and there was a guy here who is pretty well known in that for me to work with. I'm working my butt off, but I have NO idea what the future holds. I don't think JHU is particularly prestigious, so I'll probably be pretty lucky to get a job at one of the places I really like (MIT, Harvard, etc.), because I have also been told that you basically move down a tier to get a job. But there's always hope!2011-12-31
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    Anyway, I would recommend you improve your GRE scores. I didn't, and I'm doing okay, but I would have had a lot more options with better math GRE scores....2011-12-31
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    By the way, advice of the form "As long as you do $x$, you should be fine [to get a job at a top 50 math department]" is extremely false in today's job climate, no matter what one thing you take $x$ to be. If you want to succeed in today's market you should be doing *just about everything right*: research promise, existing publications, proven teaching strength, connections with people in your field, a thoroughly carefully and professionally prepared application...Times are tough, folks.2012-07-14
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    The City University of New York does not place as high an emphasis on GRE scores as many other schools of similar caliber. CUNY has an excellent math PhD program, with strong faculty in diverse areas, and they are consistently in the top 40 of the US News & World Report rankings of math grad programs.2016-03-03

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