How Much Say Would A Prospective Supervisor Have In A Students Admission To An Applied Math Graduate Program? I am interested in applying to some applied math graduate programs but I have some deficiencies in a few math courses. However, I have reached out to a potential supervisor and our conversations are going well. So my question is, if a prospective supervisor wants to take on a particular student, but students have to enter a common pool of applicants, how much influence on An individuals admissions does a prospective advisor have in the process.
&quot;Soft&quot; influence
It's hard to judge how much soft influence a professor has. Every professor will have a different level of influence, and also a different approach in how they wield it. There is no way to answer this definitively. The most influential professors in departments that allow them to wield influence will have as much power as they want to choose students. Professors in other departments may have little to no influence at all.
&quot;Hard&quot; influence
In my experience, the more powerful control over admissions that professors have is money. For many programs, there are more qualified applicants than there are slots available for funding. That means that many qualified applicants miss the cut despite being qualified: there are simply too many other prospective students that either have better resumes or have a better fit to the program. However, the program still wants those students!
If a professor has resources to fund a student and offers to do so, that student can possibly skip the queue a bit, because they are no longer competing for the at large funding slots. In the grad program I attended, these students were referred to as &quot;direct admit&quot; students: they joined a lab immediately that offered to support them. Other students had a year to rotate and choose a supervisor.
Summary
I have no idea which of these categories your program and professor is more likely to fall into, if either. If you want to be a student, apply. It's better to apply and fail to be accepted than to not apply and guarantee you will not be accepted.