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wine in coffee cups

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Everything posted by wine in coffee cups

  1. You should not have too much trouble finding a 1 BR in a 10 minute walk from Porter or Davis under that price (excluding utilities, which usually aren't included). Search 02144 on Padmapper. I'm in a very large 1.5 BR (many landlords would list it as a 2 BR) for $1450/mo near both T stops. Units with crappier kitchens or without laundry in building will go for less, and things also get cheaper east of Cedar St as you get farther from the red line.
  2. I'd take the new job and revisit your educational goals and interests after some time there.
  3. I definitely agree with what the others have said with respect to program size, but I'm curious why it is being suggested that post-graduate opportunities are clearly superior coming out of Michigan. To my untrained naive eye, recent Yale stats alums seem to be doing just fine in academic placement. On this dimension, I'm just not convinced that Michigan is meaningfully better. Happy to be corrected, of course, but if levy is cool with the size and the people and the research, the whole $10K more per year thing from Yale does sound like an awfully enticing tiebreaker (though perhaps this is not as significant given cost of living differences?)
  4. After I had gotten into a few programs I really liked, about a month ago I tried to decline a department that was not nearly as good a fit (location, size) but that had offered me a special fellowship. I took the recommended simple approach with a short but warm email. I just wanted to do the right thing and free up a spot and funding for someone else, you know? The director would have none of that, though, and proceeded to engage me into some borderline aggressive email back-and-forths about why I turned them down, where I was thinking of going, etc. The director made some incredible overtures during this and ended up telling me I had a standing offer for future years if I realized I made a mistake and wanted to transfer. It was really flattering, to be sure, but also incredibly draining and stressful to keep doing this volleying and continue justifying my decision not to go in the face of all this generosity. I'm honestly still not sure if they've crossed me off the list yet because I'm still getting inane snail mail from the grad school about immunizations. So, yeah, I wish it were always as easy as a short email. I'd still recommend that, I guess, but be prepared to defend your decision if they bristle.
  5. Well, it certainly sounds like you want to go to Yale! If potentially better academic placement coming out of Michigan is the only thing stopping you, you might look at Yale's alumni listings and see how you feel about what has become of the former students of your potential advisors: http://www.stat.yale.edu/People/alumni.php?displaytype=Ph.D.%2C+rev+chron
  6. Since this thread has been revived, may as well follow up for future statistics PhD applicants who wondering what to do about the subject test. (n=1, though, people, n=1.) I had a 58%ile subject score. I submitted it to Chicago and got in. I did not submit it to Berkeley, Columbia, Duke, IA State, Michigan, Northwestern, or Washington but still got in. I did not submit it to CMU or Harvard and did not get in. I'm guessing that the presence/absence of that subject test score had little bearing on any of these results.
  7. If you admire and respect this professor, you should take her concerns about English PhD prospects very, very seriously. I would set up a meeting with her to hear her out about graduate school and the job market. Just because what she has to say makes you uncomfortable doesn't mean you should ignore it!
  8. There are several regular posters here who are current students (or faculty even I think?) in stats or biostats, so questions about those fields tend to get very lengthy and useful comments. As ANDS points out, the pure math people get advice on other forums where there is a better concentration of knowledgeable current grad students to field questions.
  9. Commuter rail is more expensive than that. He can buy four months of commuter passes for certain windows at a tiny discount through Brandeis, but the timing is idiotic and requires him to get passes that cover months during which he will barely need to be on campus. It might be cheaper for him to get a commuter rail pass through BU's purchase program (well, through you getting it from BU of course) because they probably have a better discount. I know MIT has a much better discount than Brandeis, about 50% (so passes are ~$75 month instead of full price $151), and it is not unheard of for Brandeis students to make friends with MIT students who don't need passes themselves to have them buy them for them...
  10. Interesting combination of schools, he definitely has a point about the cheaper rent in Waltham and commute costs. You might investigate rents in Watertown, which I think will be more than in Waltham and will require a little commuting on both your parts but might be a workable compromise. You can take the 57 in, he can take the 70 out, and access to Boston/Cambridge will be much easier than from Waltham. Also, a good number of Brandeis grad students live around Porter Square and take the commuter rail in from there (quite fast) or drive. The Somerville side is cheaper than the Cambridge side of the square, but rents will still be higher. You would take the red line from Porter, change to the green line B at Park Street and ride to BU, which will take 45-60 minutes at most times of the day.
  11. I agree with your overall point that negotiating funding is not likely to be all that fruitful, but I'm a little surprised you don't think there is extra funding for top applicants generally? It may just vary from institution to institution, but at least several of the graduate schools I've gotten into seem to have some kind of supplemental funds under a "Dean's Fellowship" (or named something to that effect). The way these appear to work is that particular applicants are nominated by the departments for the fellowship but the graduate school itself makes the decision and the award. I've been lucky enough to have a few of these thrown my way (some coming with the initial offer, some later) and from what I'm seeing, the award amounts to an extra few thousand dollars per year and the language accompanying the letters is way over-the-top in flattery. I think it's really hard to know if you'll be in a position to be nominated for one of these, but it's not out of the question for something like this to come the way of a top applicant who hasn't made up their mind yet.
  12. I totally understand finding it hard to write about yourself, it's kind of miserable but well worth it to suck it up and put yourself out there. Some pointers: Take all the prompts from the programs you are applying to and combine them into a mega-prompt. Make sure you address every single thing that is asked of you (not clear if what you have now would do that). The prompts can be vague individually, but giving yourself more constraints to work around usually makes things easier by inducing an obvious structure. Your introductory vignette is disconnected from everything else, and to be honest, I had a mixed reaction to it that I don't think you were going for. It took me a second to realize this was actually a positive comment on your potential because the "If you have no other plans..." negative lead was what I processed first in my quick read. I would rethink this and maybe try to come up with a different "hook" that ties in better to the rest of what you write, or else just begin straightforwardly. As those above are saying, you need more specifics. You want this to read like you wrote it, not any other interchangeable prospective economics PhD. Talking about projects you've worked on can show your scholarly potential and intellectual curiosity even if they're not directly related to what you want to study. Right now what I'm getting is you were somewhat naively interested in macro, but then soon switched to micro. I'm not really sure why or what interested you about microeconomics specifically because you actually spent more space talking about macroeconomic questions that drew you in but you stopped caring about for unclear reasons, and then your current interests in development seem to come out of nowhere. Courses will be on your transcript, so you shouldn't use much space mentioning that you took them unless you are trying to make a specific point about your interests or describing some special/non-obvious skills or interests you got out of them. I think you have a good command of the written word so I don't anticipate that grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and such will be a problem for you, though of course you should have others read over your drafts for those once you get closer to submission. What you really should do now is figure out what experiences you have that make you an interesting potential scholar and then write about those. What I found best was to create the mega-prompt as mentioned above, set up a rough outline, and then fill that in with semi-rambling paragraphs talking about every possible concrete thing I thought might be interesting. I initially went way over the word limits (which were 1000 words at most schools), but then found a lot of crap that could be discarded or stated much more concisely to bring it down to a much tighter 900 words.
  13. For the most part, details about funding and visits aren't in the offer emails I'm getting and come a few days later. I think you can safely assume the TAship is an acceptance, though!
  14. Specifically re: UW stats: their admitted student visit day is at the beginning of March, so I can't imagine they would sit on acceptances for too much longer.
  15. A few schools do post department-level admissions data. I am aware of Duke, University of Minnesota, and University of Washington.
  16. That's such a reasonable and rational thought. Unfortunately reason and rationality don't seem to apply to this process. Not to make the rest of you snuggle with your smartphones from now on, but I got an offer last night that was sent after 10 pm in school's timezone.
  17. Perhaps the department can connect you with a current student willing to let you sleep on their couch? You'd learn more about the program that way anyway.
  18. Also interested in people's thoughts on this. I got an extremely flattering acceptance email a couple of days ago that was followed up with an offer for a special fellowship that carries similar "let us know ASAP" language (since I think they want to offer it to someone else soon if I decline). I'm nowhere near ready to make any firm statements as I'm still waiting to hear on nine other decisions, including several from places I would prefer to attend that historically have not gotten back with acceptances until late Feb/early March. The emotional manipulation/guilt-tripping/coyness that surrounds these back-and-forths is kind of stressing me out, though I won't dispute this is a good problem to have.
  19. One thing I've noticed is that the schools that host their own applications generally have much better interfaces than the applications hosted by Embark or ApplyYourself. I'm actually shocked at how terrible the ApplyYourself and Embark platforms have been. Even across departments and schools, application requirements don't really vary that much. It shouldn't be hard for these companies to come up with clean-looking contemporary templates that need only minor adaptations for each institution. They certainly have the scale to justify a little investment in design, yet what they provide looks like it was coded up in the 90s, uses non-intuitive navigation and structure, and doesn't even work well. Why have so many universities contracted out their application hosting to these incompetent companies?
  20. I ran this search: http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=statistic*&t=a&pp=250 and within each of the 9 pages I looked for the word "interview" or "visit" and used my judgment.
  21. I was curious about this too and pulled up the historical thegradcafe data. Some evidence of PhD statistics interviews (email, phone, or on campus): Yale Florida State UMD UIUC Rochester Duke UCSB Oxford University of South Carolina Michigan Rutgers Case Western
  22. I applied online and submitted on the deadline date (Dec. 8).
  23. I'm applying for statistics PhD programs this year. One of my top choices has gotten back to me already, not with an acceptance but essentially saying I'm shortlisted. The director of the program offered me the opportunity to visit with faculty and current students at the department's expense. The email was rather vague as to what exactly is expected of me during this visit, but the word "interview" did sneak in at the end. I know many other kinds of programs do pre-admission interviews (especially in the life sciences), but I haven't heard of this for straight stats programs before. I've skimmed some advice about general grad school schools, but any ideas as to what to expect in terms of what a statistics department might ask or be looking for?
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