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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Big B" data-source="post: 899223" data-attributes="member: 9982">Well, as someone just finishing up a PhD, might as well throw in my 2 cents:1.  Your top priority should be to figure out what you want to study.  "Math" is way too general.  The more specific, the better, but at least try to narrow it down to a particular sub-field.  Even the best departments in the world aren't good in everything, so you need to figure out where the good places for your particular topic are.  Try to pick a place with more than one professor who studies that topic, which leads to:2.  If you can (and this, I'll admit, is much harder than 1.), try to figure out who you would like to work with.  In grad school, your advisor owns you, lock, stock, and barrel.  You want to try to make sure that whoever you end up working with has a personality that's compatible with yours.  Some advisors expect their students to work 80 hours a week.  If that's important to you, you might want to find out before you sign on.As for the person who said that going to a more prestigous school means more work, don't believe it.  Students at "hard" schools don't work appreciably harder than those at second-tier institutions.  I'm finishing up a PhD at MIT and had plenty of free time.  The fact that I had no life is entirely my own fault.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Good luck.  I'll close with a joke about mathematicians -- An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are each given a long piece of string and instructed to enclose the maximum area possible with that string.The engineer lays the string on the ground in a circle, stating "A circle encloses the maximum area for a particular perimeter."The physicist points out that the engineer has not accounted for general relativity, and therefore places the string in a very slightly off-circle shape.  He states "I have successfully enclosed the largest space-time metric flux."The mathematician makes a very small circle with the string, then stands inside it.  He then states, "I define myself to be outside of the circle ..."Like I said, good luck.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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