Small Liberal Arts Colleges

[Anonymous No.11150302]

What's it like to be a math major at a small liberal arts college? How rigorous is the curriculum(Is it easy or hard)? How does the experience differ from that of a large state university? I've heard that class sizes are smaller and instruction tends to focus more on student interaction. Is this true and if so could any Anon's share their experiences? Thx!

[Anonymous No.11150305]

Depends on the college retard

[Anonymous No.11150310]

just go to the most expensive college possible and don't get any scholarships just put it all on student loans and then when you graduate work at starbucks for 60 years to pay off your three million dollars of debt

[Anonymous No.11150313]

>>11150310
>starbucks for 60 years to pay off your three million dollars of debt
Paying off your loans kek
At that point just run off to HK or Russia and build a new life

[Anonymous No.11150326]

>>11150302
there was a thread posted by a math major at Williams:
>>/sci/thread/11121412

honestly majoring in anything STEM at a liberal arts school seems retarded to me, but apparently that anon thinks if you go to Williams for math, then you could get accepted to grad school at Stanford or something. maybe that is true in math, since math departments basically fall into the same funding criteria as humanities departments....

[Anonymous No.11150332]

>>11150326
Interesting. Thank you

[Anonymous No.11150932]

I'm from Canada, so my experience may be a tad different, but it was quite pleasant. Pretty comfy, profs were always nice, helpful and had lots of free office time. Classes tended towards the easier side, as most students there are destined for education. Word of warning, if you decide to do anything more than a bsc, you may need to switch out half way through. Also, if you have one bad prof in your major, you may be forced to take multiple classes with them. For instance, my Uni has two (2) math profs and an engineer. Only one prof is good, and I'm sure you can imagine how the engineer is. It's similar for any non-biochem stem major here. Philosophy and physics only has one. Depending how big it is, you get to know your fellow classmates pretty well. My Uni has about 1500 students (I think), with only ~30 or so being math majors. Would recommend, 8/10.

[Anonymous No.11150938]

It's ideal in my experience; most classes are very small and taught to the top of the class. If you're intelligent and driven you can really stand out and get a lot of opportunities.

People from my school end up at top grad programs fairly regularly.

[Anonymous No.11150997]

>>11150932
that sounds fucking terrible. It's like the college equivalent of being homeschooled.

[Anonymous No.11151019]

>>11150302
>instruction tends to focus more on student interaction
I looked at a tiny college (3k students) that frequently said this. I think it's a meme. The benefit of small class size was offset by the fact that the department only had six professors, limited class options, small networking opportunities, very little research, no masters/phd program, etc. It might be different for your degree, so look at those things. I ended up choosing a Pac12 school with 25k students, and about 60 professors in the department.

[Anonymous No.11151022]

>>11150932
Are the math courses lecture based or flipped? Also, how early do they start teaching proofs? In US we have a separate course that introduces us to proofs. I go to a small public uni and most of my courses for the first 2yrs were all focused on calculation.

[Anonymous No.11151036]

>>11150997
What's a good number of students for a decent school?

[Anonymous No.11151055]

>>11151022
We have a course, "Elementary discrete mathematics", which serves as the first proofs based class, and it's in the first semester. It goes through logic, "naive" set theory, divisibility, modulos, graph theory, combinatronics, functions and relations, etc. Linear Algebra 1 had some proofs, though the prof that taught it left the year after my freshman year. Anything past outside of calc in pure math had at least some proof work, usually a lot. It was all lecture based, but the labs were fun, where we'd start working on the lab reports, in groups of 3 on the whiteboards in the class (but they were to be handed in individually).

[Anonymous No.11151075]

>>11150302
<--pic not related. I kind of regret not applying to a libarts college. I ended up attending a local uni. The highest degree they offer is a masters in stats/comp. math. They uni is small with <10k students. I commute to school as do most of the students. The experience sucks and I just want to graduate as quickly as possible.

[Anonymous No.11151088]

>>11151055
Were the labs done in-class with required teamwork? If so sounds interesting. I remember doing labs in Diff Eq, but it was meant to be done outside of class. It was horrible, we were supposed to model some equations in MATLAB but were never taught any commands. Discrete math sounds like an interesting way to introduce proofs, I wish my uni had a course on combinatorics+graph theory.

[Anonymous No.11151138]

>>11151088
By lab I mean an "extra" day of class outside of the regular 3 hours a week. Yup, required teamwork. This was moreso in the second year courses, ie. Intro to analysis, lin alg 2, but it really made it more engaging, especially when we were having troubles with a proof. With the first year classes, particularly the calcs, the labs were there for you to take a quiz, and then work on the lab reports with the prof/lab assistant nearby. After the quiz you could just fuck off, if you were so inclined. The shitty prof at my Uni is the "applied math guy" tm, and he is obsessed with maple.The majority of my numerical analysis course was just maple, instead of the theory behind what we were doing. We had to force him to stop using it so much in multivariable calc. At least he taught us the commands though, sheesh. I really liked discrete math, it's the class that really got me into math, and removed my doubts about majoring in it. It's honestly, in my opinion, the best part about our math program. Students should be well versed in a lot of those topics by the time they start sophmore year, bare min. How can you do any analysis if you haven't seen set notation/relations, or how to formulate a proof, or even the types of proofs that exists? Seems crazy to me.

[Anonymous No.11151164]

>>11151138
>the labs were there for you to take a quiz, and then work on the lab reports with the prof/lab assistant nearby
Sounds comfy AF. When it comes to numerical analysis for undergrads I think it should really be called Numerical Methods instead. In my uni we have a course called Intro to Proofs. The standard text is "Book of proof by richard hammack". We learn sets, logic, various proof techniques and a little bit of number theory.

[Anonymous No.11151220]

>>11151164
The good prof didn't use textbooks, instead he wrote his own and printed them as spiral bound books for free for everyone (except in the 70 person calc 2 class). If you can read french, they're also online