Grad School Help

[shallow]

I finished my undergrad degree this last June, I had applied to grad schools in December of my senior year like you're supposed to, but didn't get in anywhere.

I've been trying to find a job as an actuary, passed an actuary exam, looking to take another one, but finding a job is still hard.

Anyway, that doesn't matter since I don't want to be an actuary, I want to study math. Please help me figure out where I have a reasonable shot of getting accepted in my current situation.

school: UCSC
GPA: 3.0
major GPA: 3.3
major: Math (pure concentration)
GRE: 500 verb, 800 quant
math GRE: 620 (should have signed up to retake this a couple months ago)

I took as many math classes as I possibly could, once I figured out I wanted to do math. I ended with 20 undergrad math classes (~100 credits) and 5 graduate classes (25 credits), graduated in 4 years and did relatively well in the grad classes(B/B+'s with one A-), also wrote a thesis.

grad classes covered: rings & modules, fields & galois theory, commutative algebra (ch1-9 of atiyah), measure theory, Lp spaces, functional analysis, some spectral theory

I know I'm not going to Princeton or Harvard, but I want to find the place where I can do my best possible phd work under the circumstances.

My main interests are in the direction of Commutative algebra, Algebraic Geometry, and soft analysis. Though I haven't learned any algebraic number theory or much algebraic topology, I am fairly confident if I continue studying homological algebra (as I currently am), that I will end up set on Algebraic Geometry.

any personal experiences or lesser known places with great faculty are also appreciated

[blahblahblah]

[gauss202]

I wouldn't go so far as to say a B in a graduate course is a horrible grade. There are certainly people with similar GPAs to yours who get into Math grad schools. It's all in the context of what type of school you're hoping to get into. If you don't mind saying, what grad schools did you apply to in your senior year? (And you should think about who you had to write your recommendations for you and if they were the best people to have asked.)

[shallow]

[Gen8]

[shallow]

[yenlee]

shallow, one question that you should ask yourself and answer honestly is: Why is your application so weak? Specifically, does it reflect your actual mathematical abilities or not? And assuming that the answer is no, why is that? Have you changed in some way?

These are tough questions, but they are important. While I sincerely believe that anyone who wants to major in math in college should do so, I don't believe that anyone who wants a PhD in math should pursue one. The reason is that embarking on a PhD is embarking on a specific career path, so you should have some idea of what you intend to *do* with that PhD and what your chances of success are.

While I agree with the idea that it's nice to go somewhere different for graduate school than undergrad, it is sometimes the case that the best school that will accept you is your alma mater.

Finally, the number of people who regularly post on AoPS who could have chosen between Harvard and MIT for a math PhD can surely be counted on two hands. Even the number of AoPSers who will face such a choice in the future is probably much smaller than you think. You're talking about a population of at most a couple dozen people in the world per year.

[shallow]