StatPhD2014

Did you apply for Math or Stat PhD programs?

dig a little deeper the vast majority of those are post docs. Its probably also better to look at more recent years (say past 5-10 years)

Below is the link for placements, you can google their names to find out exactly what position they obtained, some are post-docs and some are tenure track positions, a quick search will reveal which one. http://www.stat.cmu.edu/academics/graduate/recent-phd-dissertations

The job placements for Carnegie Mellon is online, you should check it out. In terms of academic placement it doesn't look great, for Michigan you can call or email them and they will give you some recent placement information, it sees they have better placements than Carnegie Mellon. I agree with CW that Michigan has had some impressive placements over the past few years

which programs some are still not difficult to get into

well for some industries the name of the school does matter. Examples include hedge funds, top tier investment banks/ consulting shops/ trading firms, and tech companies.

its definitely not random, it depends on how many students the advisor currently has and whether he is willing to work with you

Edit: double post deleted

How do you think these rankings compare to the NRC rankings

Nice! congrats! what are your other options

Columbia looks like they sent out their acceptances and waitlist, wouldnt put much faith in there judging from past years results

Michigan is tied with ncsu and Texas A&M

Well this discussion took a negative turn no reason why we cant have a reasonable discussion on what the GRE verbal measures. I was never telling future test takers they shouldn't study vocab my previous post makes that clear. As to the comment about being a vocab whiz, my entire argument is that you dont need to be one, there are many ways to get a great score due to the long tail on the verbal score (as my previous post indicates), having a great vocab is just one of them. But anyways if anyone else wants to have a reasonable discussion about the GRE measures im all for it, or whether knowing a ton of vocab words is neccesary to get a good score i would love to hear alternative viewpoints.

You don't need to ask about your application in general or lead off with it. If they have done admissions ask them what they look for in a candidate in terms of grades, strength of undergrad insitution, importance of research (for example can it overcome poor or less than stellar performance in coursework), after this you can ask some questions specific to your situation. For example in Stats some departments such as Columbia or Uchicago highly recommend the Math subject test, but that is actually a means for them to gather more information about your math background. If you went to a top 10 university, and had a great GPA in mathm then the subject test becomes irrelevant for them

Come on half of those words are not difficult at all, for example "heretic", do people really not know what that means by the time they graduate from college. These guides suggest to study vocab words because it is an easy way to improve your score, i am not saying that it doesnt improve. Just that you can still get a great score with an above average vocab especially since so many international students take the test, american students already have a huge advantage there in terms of percentiles. If you have great reasoning skills an average vocab will be sufficient for this test, if not then studying vocab words will be necessary. The reading comprehension should be accesible to most domestic students not really any difficult words there. Also only a small percentage of sentence completion and equivalence questions have words that are unreasonable, luckily the verbal section has a long tail. For example a 720 when i took it was in the 98th percentile, so you can still get a good amount of questions wrong (as compared to the quantitative section where the scoring is a lot more unforgiving). Now if you are scoring in the middle or towards the upper middle getting those tough vocab questions correct will definitely improve your score, but given the way the scoring works you can get those wrong and get all the reasoning questions correct and end up with a great score