Application

As is explained in detail at the web-site of the Graduate School, the following materials comprise the application:

• Completed application form. This is to be completed online. To receive full consideration, your application should be completed by December 15.
• Application fee. Your application will not be processed until this fee is paid. Do not send it to the Department of Mathematics. Rather, it must be paid during the online application process.
• Your personal statement. This will be carefully considered the program admission committee to rank your application. Be as specific as possible about your research interests and qualifications. If you have particular reasons for choosing Northwestern, be sure to indicate them.
• Two (or more) letters of recommendation from professors familiar with your advanced work. It is your responsibility to make sure that we receive these letters in time. These should be submitted by the letter writer through the online application system.
• A scanned copy of your transcript for each colleges and/or universities attended should be uploaded to your application. It is helpful to include a list of junior-, senior-, and graduate-level mathematics courses taken or to be completed before entering graduate school at Northwestern. For international students, this roughly corresponds to courses in the last two years of undergraduate study. More information about transcripts and how they are submitted may be found at the Graduate School's site on Transcripts.
• Results of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) -- both the general test and the subject test in mathematics. No application will be rejected because of the absence of GRE scores, but this component of your application does carry significant weight in the decisions of the graduate admissions committee, so it is in your advantage to have taken both the general and Mathematics parts of the GRE, and had the official results submitted to us by the end of January. The institutional code for Northwestern assigned by ETS is 1565 for GRE grade submission. If you have the results, you may add a scan to your application.
• For students whose native language is not English who have not obtained an undergraduate or graduate degree from an academic institution whose language of instruction is English, the results of either the TOEFL or IELTS exam.

Note that official transcripts are required of the results of the TOEFL exam, and we cannot admit an applicant until these are received (though we will process the file).

• For the TOEFL, official scores must be less than two years old. On the internet based test an applicant must score 100 or higher, and we would like a score 26 or higher on the speaking portion. For the IELTS, an applicant must score 7.0 or higher.
• Additional information regarding the TOEFL and GRE exams is available from the Northwestern Graduate School at their page on Test Scores

The application is entirely electronic. Applicants must not not send material to the Mathematics Department without first consulting the Graduate Program Assistant.