Graduate school and students with learning disabilities
WARNING: Stay at your home institution, even if it means that you
might not get your ideal pick of subject area. Once you leave
your home undergrad institution, you won't be able to get back
your accomodations so easily. I was accepted and into a Math PhD
program this year with full funding. I moved across the country
to work with a certain professor at this new school.

The math department is awesome, but the disability services is
horrible. I was told that I am the only graduate student that has
ever asked for accomodations...ever! The director of the center
somehow thinks that I am being insincere despite the multiple
levels of documentation that I have sent. The higher your level
of education is, the more likely it is that you are supposed to
be a failure if you are an LD student. Since you'll be going into
math, they simply won't believe that you have any problems.

Do not disclose that you require accomodations to anyone until
after you have been accepted with funding. Get these issues
settled before you start classes. It might even be a good idea to
defer your studies until you get these issues resolved with the
disability services.

If you have poor grades due to a learning disability and want to
get into a grad school, then you must compensate with published
research with your professors. When it comes to graduate
acceptance, they are only looking for research potential. They
will overlook your GRE scores or grades if they are above the
50th percentile and you have a strong research background. The
GRE isn't predictive of anything for math students because it is
a timed exam full of highschool math problems that you can do in
your sleep. With a learning disability, you will get a low score
because you will only finish fewer than half of the problems, but
since you are a math major, you will get all of them
right. Again, they are highschool math problems.

The only grades that really count are are your proof-heavy math
courses. You should try to get As in most of these. Especially
Abstract Algebra and Analysis. The grad school will ignore any
past failures in the pre-calc through calculus sequence of
courses if you have done well in the proof heavy
courses (abstract algebra, analysis, topology, number theory,
combinatorics, graph theory).

Go to all of the mathematics conferences and colloquiums. Hang
out with the professors. Get to know a few of them very
well. Learn about their research. They will give you toy problems
to take home for fun. If you do enough of these, then they will
eventually give you some real problems to work on. Then all of a
sudden, you will be presenting at conferences and publishing
papers with them. They will write you awesome letters for grad
school.

Once in grad school, you will have to deal with another hurdle --
the qualifier exam (quals). These are typically timed exams. You
will have to make a really good impression on all of the
department's professors for several years if you want them to
argue for giving you more time on the quals. Giving someone
without a learning disability more time on the quals will not
change the outcome of the exam, so they will allow more time in
the case of an LD student.

In grad school, you will work with your professors very
closely. Work on their problems for a while. Eventually you will
run into something that they haven't thought of. This will be
your PhD thesis. Every question that you can answer in math
generates new questions.

Your mathematics ability is judged by creativity, not on
speed.