a school dilemma

For reasons that are rather long and painful to go into, I ended up settling for a local college without much of a reputation for my undergraduate degree. To be honest, the decision to attend here was less like a decision and more like a resignation against caring anymore.

When I first came here I was solely interested in doing physics; then in my first year I attracted the attention of a graduate student who helped convert me over to mathematics and has since introduced me to the really good professors on staff. Apparently, I got lucky, because this was a frequent hang-out spot for Paul Erdös and his presence attracted a lot of top-notch Hungarian mathematicians, especially in Combinatorics and Graph Theory. They have annual conferences now in Erdös' honor that draw people in internationally (I went to the one this spring where a fly-in from Tel Aviv lectured on the Probabilistic Method in proofs). Next year is UCLA. There are several postdocs here from Cambridge, and I personally know one very young graduate student (my age, actually--I think he started when he was like 14 or something) who placed 2nd in the Putnam a few years back; and he came up here specifically to work with these people. He's stark-raving brilliant. So are the professors who published papers with Erdös; having met some of these professors, I can say that they really are on an entirely different plane of existence -- and what can be better than having incredible professors, right? I'm taking a class on number theory from one of them this summer, and I'm elated at the potential it holds for future placement.

The problem is, the school doesn't even place on the NRC rankings...at all. How do those rankings work? Is there a great deal of politics involved? Do they update often? I can't shake it, despite what I see here.

As an undergrad, I really don't know how to feel about any of this. Is it realistic to expect a school with a pretty shitty undergraduate student-body to have high-quality graduate programs? (Are the two usually indicative of each other?) I only know of one grad student who went here as an undergrad -- they rest chose to come here from somewhere else, and from fairly decent schools, too. Or am I just seeing the fluff and puff of academia? To be quite honest I don't know what constitutes a good program or not; it's hard to see from the outside. By the time next year rolls around, I think I should be developing some idea of where I want to go for grad school, and what I want to specialize in. If I stay here, my choices will be decidedly limited to discrete math (which may or may not be a bad thing).

The biggest problem in all this is my inner voice telling me to dissent: there is simply no way a person can get this lucky. It's the "it's too good to be true" syndrome; I know this, but I can't help it.

For the grad-students among you -- how did you decide where to go? Did you stay put? What's your story?