Nista

Hi all! I am trying to decide between several offers, and I would really appreciate any input I can get. I’ve narrowed it down to Berkeley biostats MA, U Penn biostats PhD, and Stanford Bioinformatics PhD. They are all funded offers, and I am hoping to do well enough to perhaps have a shot at some academic institution, eventually. I am finding it really hard to decide since I am worried about specific component(s) of each offer: Berkeley is a MA offer, even though they claim they take their MA students for PhD slots. I’ve also been cautioned that the department might be too small and converging to causal inference (this might a very biased opinion, I am just repeating it). I’ve had great chats with few of their faculty members, however. I am interested in statistical genomics/bioinformatics/machine learning/large-scale inference of high-dimensional data, which does not seem to be big at U Penn. I am not sure how good of a “fit” U Penn is, but it overall seemed like a very good department. Despite it being very heavy on stats, I am afraid a PhD in data science/biomedical informatics will shut the door on more theoretical components of statistics (research-wise) & future appointments. There is however some possibility of working with few big names from the stats department, and their biostats concentration will be within the bioinformatics department in near future (as the program changes to "Data Science"). Thank you for your input and congrats to all on all the amazing offers