Thanks for the reply!!
Both are from my local Us that are globally quite highly ranked I supposed, from all those Times and QS rankings, and I am not from India/China.
I wasnt much of eager student in my undergrad, and my interest only slowly started becoming stronger in my later part of my masters. and i m not strong in my theory. So my grades werent solids As. in fact, i only have 2 As out of 10 modules for my msc....
as to why i am aiming for straight phd instead of another masters is largely due to funding. i need full funding where possible, and masters dont provide funding from my understanding. naturally those that provide full funding for their phd students are usually those top ranked universities
so u think those 5 abv are near impossible to reach, excluding UC Berkeley (i know this is to far out )?
what are some other well regarded uni? i didnt really wanna do phd in a uni that is not that well recognised globally... but i know i cant possibly be much of a chooser w my profile...
another thing is, since i am interested in applied, some said that biostats might be more suitable. my work exp could be considered as biostatistician i supposed. bt i wanted stats as i didnt really want to limit myself to bio.
by profs, u mean stats profs or any profs? because i dont really know any stats prof per se. what i do have are profs in the research industry that i worked for. oh, and by prof, do you mean prof prof, or those associate/asst profs will be just as fine?
thanks for the advice that no prior contact is needed. i didnt really have a fixed area in mind, so that would be a challenge to find so many potential profs.
so is it recommended that i retake my gre? not quite sure on how big a part gre plays. those schs i aiming for, gre scores are like in the range of 166+.