bayessays

Assuming your grades from your master's are good, you can definitely apply to any school. You'll probably get into top 10 programs but I would add some safer programs in the top 20 too. Don't worry about a B. Nobody will think anything of it with the rest of your record. You clearly have some coding skills, so no, not have programming classes will not matter.

I'm not saying TAMU or Purdue are in bad places. Most would just consider the towns to be pretty boring. I meant that Cornell is an Ivy League school in a liberal state, whereas TAMU is in rural Texas, which is more conservative. Very different environment in terms of religion and politics, so if that's an important factor, you may want to see which environment you'd be more comfortable in.

The big conferences are national, so you'll have to travel to them anyways. You should look into whether the department helps students fund their travel. But you will have to determine for yourself whether the small town is good for you. Texas A&M is very much a small college town in a pretty conservative part of the country, a couple hours a way from a big city. Cornell is in a small city too, but very culturally different. Some people consider Bloomington, Ithaca and Charlottesville as pretty desirable college towns, whereas Purdue and TAMU are in towns where most people would not choose to live.

Oh and Colorado State has a big ecology/spatial focus.

You'll find censored data/high dimensional people at a ton of places - Minnesota has a big focus on HD machine learning (think Lasso). For software, UC Davis has a major R guy, Duncan something. For spatial, look at Ohio State (and lower down, Mizzou). For functional data, FSU has a huge group of people working on shape analysis and a wavelet guy - one of their grads is also a prof at OSU now.

I think most people would consider Seattle to have better weather than most the US. It's a little cloudy, but the rain is greatly exaggerated and the climate is much more moderate than the Midwest or Northeast. The cost of living is the main issue there.

That's tough, I'm not sure there's a forum consensus on whether domestic students should submit GRE math scores around 70% Most people lean towards only submitting 80+. You're right on the border, so it probably won't help or hurt a ton.

To be clear, I think it's reasonable to apply to those top schools besides Stanford even if they are reaches.

I think the range of schools you're applying to is fine, although I don't think you'll get into the top 6 on your list. Agreed on adding more 20-50, although you could go higher. Your low GPA won't be a huge issue because you obviously turned it around after freshman year. I wouldn't bother explaining.

And all that is true. But these are the exceptions to the rule. You are seeing EE students who do statistics stuff, but you're not seeing the 90% of them who don't do anything related to statistics. You're seeing the applied math student who took a class with you, but not the 90% who have no interest in stats. You can do statistical ML research in a CS department, but the focus of the classes and research is so different that most people in such programs will have nothing in common.

I think the OP is really overstating the similarities here. There is overlap, but 90% of the professors in these departments do things that are not statistics and the core set of classes is very different. If you know you want to be a statistician, you will have the most options in a statistics department. It depends a lot on what you're interested in.

Have you looked at Michigan State? They are the statistics department that has the heaviest probability focus.

@cyberwulfI strongly agree on your latter point about doing what will make them most comfortable. You worded that better than I could have and agree that might be important for them to find such a department. I can definitely see the pendulum swing in the positive direction based on the story, but since they already have a pretty good profile and seemed to not really want to reveal the details, I leaned the other way. Totally makes sense though! My response lacked nuance.

I would not include this information - right or wrong, there is no way this information can help you with 99% of admissions people. Talking about mental illness in a statement of purpose is also not advisable.

Your GRE Q and those couple low math grades.

I think you're way underselling yourself. True, you don't have analysis, so you probably won't be going to Stanford. But I think you can generally look in the 10-50 range for statistics PhD and top biostat programs and you'll probably have quite a bit of success. Apply to any MS program you are interested in.

You're not going to get into any biostat PhD program without the math pre-requisites. The programs you chose are also among the most competitive in the country. As an international student where competition is very high, even if you took through linear algebra and got As, and raised your GRE Q by a few points, these schools would be reaches. The only people who might be able to not have these classes on their transcripts are people who have taken more advanced math like real analysis. You need to get these classes on your transcript, improve your GRE and apply to some lower ranked schools next year.

No, you're fine. Some programs may evaluate people with an MS in statistics differently, but you have nothing to worry about.

I would add some lower schools. If you were a domestic applicant, I would not feel that any of your choices are safe and admission for international students is very competitive.

You'll find better info about math programs over at the mathematics GRE forum. This forum is mostly populated by statistics people. For statistics programs, many of the top programs have probabilists like Stanford and Berkeley. I'd also check out other top schools like Washington, Harvard, Chicago which all should have a couple. Mid/lower ranked schools that have big probability groups are UNC and MSU.

I'm not sure your age will have much of an effect. I could see it helping people think you are a genius - I don't think it will have a negative effect because you've already proven very successful in college to have the maturity to do a PhD. Either way, I wouldn't worry about it and you obviously can't change it. I would personally just not even mention it. Your incredibly high GRE score and consistent As help make up for the fact that you go to a less well-known school. Are you a US citizen/Permanent resident? If you were a domestic applicant, I'd say you are almost guaranteed to get into a top 6 program. Admissions are harder for international students, but you should still have good results and you shouldn't need to apply to schools as low as UIC.

@Casorati I don't think you need higher than an A, but when the number is sitting there for you to see, higher is better. @davidolohowski I think which of you will do better relies on so many factors - what school you go to (and the professors there, which will affect both how your grades and letters are interpreted), your exact classes, what types of journals your research is in, GRE scores, etc. In general, math classes and grades in them are important. But really good research and letters can mean a lot - but most people don't have letters or research that make a huge impact. If you did well through real analysis, your friend's extra math won't be a huge deal and you could possibly be in better shape - taking absurd amounts of math isn't a free ticket into a PhD program. My biggest point was more your question about the GPA cutoff. In many fields, the difference between a 3.6 and a 4.0 isn't big because the research is the differentiator. That is not the case in statistics.

Your friend is mostly right. In a field like computer science, research is super important and the grades are mostly to see that you're a somewhat competent student. Almost nobody does real statistics research prior to a PhD, so GPA and GRE scores are all you have to go off of. Also, most programs have intense qualifying exams that require you to be good at math to pass so they want the students who will do the best. Letters matter, so research is important in that it will get you positive letters, but math ability is really the most important thing. If you go to a good school, and your friend has As in a lot of graduate math classes, he will do very well in admissions.

Also, your research interests are not really topics in statistics departments, so I don't think a stats PhD would be a good use of your time.

I'm not sure about Utah/GWU/Baylor, but the rest of your list is unrealistic, especially schools like Michigan and Minnesota. International student competition is extremely intense. In addition to your inconsistent grades, your GRE Q score is too low. You need to raise that to be considered seriously for a PhD in statistics as an international student.