Y.T. Safire

They sent out some rejection letters already, but definitely not admissions letters or funding decisions. 15 applicants were invited to interview visit and 12 came last Thursday. None of us had any news about admissions.

Hi all, I am posting this message in regard of Columbia biostats. I talked to our admissions chair as well as my supervisor who is on the admissions committee. According to them, no admissions or funding decisions in regard of our PhD program are made so far and the posts on acceptance into our PhD program are beyond them. I am asked to make this post on behalf of them.

The good part of the degree might that one can take advantages of various resources to gain more skills. I know someone with the background actuarial science & economics who did a MS in biostats and ended up a data-mining related position in an insurance company. He definitely gained stills in modeling and SAS programming from the training..

I think there is difference between biostatistician and data analyst. One probably does not need to be a biostatistician to get into the data analysis side. Of course, that's my personal thought.

Thanks for your comment, cyberwulf. I understand the point biostat_prof was trying to make and I appreciate one sharing one's insight as an insider. I was just hoping to get relatively moderate comment with my previous post. I believe biostat_prof, as a professor, will be happy to encourage students to get the best opportunities they could have instead of discouraging them from even trying the top 10 programs. I hope I have clarified things.

NC State has a huge department. I believe there will certainly be a group of faculty members doing Bayesian statistics there. My friend did some research as undergrads there during the summer of 2012. It was related to GPU and she was responsible for rewriting C code based on the given R code such that parallel computing could be done.

I see. Sorry that I did not notice that you only quoted the second part of the sentence.

Hi, thanks for sharing. But could you possibly explain what you mean by "the converse is true"? Do you mean biostats programs help more in job hunting or the study of biostats includes stats or both? Thanks!

The Columbia biostats department just added the course of measure-theoretic probability theory in the math department to the compulsory curriculum of its PhD students and the reason is to make it more "modern". It seems to be moving in the opposite direction under the same "name".

Just curious, why do you think the teenagers are "unbearable" and why the college students are bearable instead?

I would definitely choose Duke over Columbia. The class size of MA program at Columbia is 150+, making it rather difficult for academic advisers to take care of each student. Also, it seems that there is big variance among various courses in terms of teaching quality. For instance, Nonparametric Statistics is good while students complained a lot about Linear Regression Models which is worrisome considering linear model is important for job-hunting.

Why do I sense it is the other way around......

Viewed from the curriculum, the MS program there seems pretty solid. The math stats sequence seems to be PhD-level instead of Cassella & Berger in most of MS programs. Heard that they just made the Bayesian course compulsory. The department seems to be Bayesian. Also, it seems that one can get much training in computing if one takes full advantage of the electives there.

I am curious how the "subjective ranking" is obtained. I am thinking that if it is obtained by talking to the current students we might wanna take into account the competitiveness of the students.

Just curious. Is there any possible explanation about why some departments don't favor their own MS students? Diversity reason or just because those PhD programs are so popular that the applicants elsewhere generally have better background than applicants in the MS programs? And I sense what most students are concerned about is whether they would be put in a position of relative disadvantages if they attended the MS program at such a department compared with attending somewhere else. It seems, according to my personal perception, that happens in stats departments more often than in biostats departments.