A statistic I overheard today, from a source that shall remain nameless (in case the source is wrong): three-fourths of mathematics graduate students leave graduate school in a different subfield of mathematics from when they came in.
Can anybody point me to a source?
I feel like "subfield" is so ill-defined a term, and people's subfield is so poorly defined at the beginning of grad school that I don't feel like there should exist a truly meaningful number like this.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it does happen all the time (I'm an example), and people starting graduate school should be aware of this.