Bayesian1701

I got the interview invite today from the program I was worried about. I shouldn't hear anything else for two weeks so I can safely stop the constant email checks.

Edit: More details. I just got a duke interview invitation for a skype interview. I am domestic so I thought that was odd that they didn't want to fly me out. It is a one on one interview with an assistant prof. Maybe they aren't doing visits this year until acceptance. I only thought I had like a 30% chance of getting interview. Guess my 2 years of Bayesian research helped more than I thought it would. They are interviewing top 15% as usual.

www.mathematicsgre.com is a math-specific forum that might be more informed on biomath programs housed in math departments. There aren't a ton of math people here on this forum but someone else might answer here. I am a senior math undergraduate student at an R1 institution, so I am somewhat familiar with math degrees/programs. And the biology subforum on the menu here might have some advice as well for biology programs. But I would consider a BS in math (if a BA in bio is possible) if you want to do more math than bio. If you want to get a PhD in Biomath at a math department that requires a lot of pure math courses you might benefit from taking all the proof based math you can. Even in stats programs outside of math departments, a school may not require a math course but having extra math courses is beneficial in admission. If you want something more bio focused, then that might be a good plan. I am not sure if you have a very strong interest in microbiology so what about getting only a minor in it (vice versa if you don't have a strong interest in math)? The biomathematicans at my undergraduate institution don't all have degrees in biology (most don't). I have a friend that got into NC State's biomath PhD program without a major in biology. I According to that plan you haven't had upper-level proof-based math and you may decide it is not for you (it wasn't for me). Start building good relationships with your professors and get advice for them, since they will have probably better advice than random students on the internet. They may have even sat on an admission committee and know what programs are looking for, and plus if they know you they can write better letters.

No Duke news for me today. Just checked portal for rejection and there wasn't one, checked spam as well. They are closed on Monday. I might email them next Friday if no one has heard anything. Hoping this doesn't mean more applications or less spots.

I had an app due on the 8th and after 10 emails over 3 months he finally finished them. He hit the first two and I was afraid he wouldn't check his email in time. He submitted the rest on the 6th. I feel your pain.

I just found a crazy thread about ETS purposely giving people opposing experimental sections to their field. So STEM majors get Verbal, and humanities and social scientists get quant. This is because all people hate the sections opposite to their field, and they will then score lower and make ETS more money through retakes. Currently, the responses are 5 opposing sections and 3 matching. If you count the multiple attempts it's 8 opposing and 3 matching. That would be a p-value of about 0.11 for you to get 8 or more opposing sections. This will still be in the anecdotal phase, but this is distracting me so what did you get for your third section? And do you agree that the data is not sufficient yet to declare this a trend?

We are no are near close to deciding that is the case. So far we have anecdotes. There is no real reason outside to assume this is the case outside of anecdotes. I am sure you could get a real small p-value on this, but that is beside the point. Even if there is a probability of 1% of this happening based on the data there are million of GRE takers and this "pattern" I am sure would occur in dozens of the small samples. I hate ETS but I really doubt this actually what is happening. On the experimental section to have ANY validity as research it would have to represent the population of test takers. They can do this two ways make it totally random or possibly stratify so half of the people within a field would get a quant. This is an unrepresentative group of responses we have had so far in this thread, and your friends probably don't represent the GRE test takers across the globe. And if this were real I feel like it would have been discovered by now outside of a gradcafe thread. I think this falls into the pattern of humans looking for a pattern that is not there. @skhann may have seen a "trend" among a few people, and then people "confirmed" his(her) belief on this thread. I am not trying to be mean or condensing here but the reports in the thread mean nothing. This genuinely scares me as a statistician and I hope that you do not continue making claims and generalizations based on small biased samples in your research. Suggesting that this is to make ETS more money is a conspiracy theory. This is exactly how irreproducible science happens. Please please please please please take a statistics class taught by a statistician (with a statistics degree) in graduate school and ask a statistician for help in statistics if you need it in your research (I think you do). A great deal of academic applied statisticians spend their entire careers collaborating and consulting with other researchers and generally love helping people make sure their experiments have the best methodology and data analysis possible. Please read this which is by a prominent statistician which includes articles on the replication crisis (there are more in the comments) that are accessible to people without a strong math background. I do research in statistics for social science and I see things like this far too often. I am not doubting your skills or abilities in your field. This is my area and I feel like I have an ethical obligation to say something. For the record, I got three quant sections, and I actually would have loved a third verbal section.

@realllllJulia where did else did you apply?

Ask in a subforum more similar to Neuroscience (try Psychology), I don't think anyone here would have a definite answer. My guess would be no because the Math GRE isn't even that common for Statistics PhD applicants, and even some Math programs don't require it. Plus the Mathematics GRE subject test has some math outside of calculus and differential equations like abstract algebra and topology which you may not have been exposed to. I would definitely study a lot for the quant section of the general GRE if you want to show that you are mathematically ready.

Right now I am freaking out about interview invites from one school. Basically, every report I have found on here has them coming out the week they come back in session. That is this week. I haven't seen anything on results but I am still worried that they already went out and no one has reported it yet. Besides a possible interview invite, I shouldn't hear anything about from my other programs for another few weeks. Waiting is so hard!

No Duke news for me today. Maybe tomorrow invites will go out? The suspense is killing me. Has anyone heard anything (even rumors) about Duke stats interviews? Congrats to all the biostats people getting accepted or invited to interview. I am so jealous of the quicker response times.

Mainly only the top programs, but not necessarily all of the top programs, and some lower ranked ones interview. Where in particular? Duke, Purdue, Virginia Tech, and Yale do, but Columbia, UT Austin, and Texas A&M do not. It varies a lot but it seems like most don't regularly interview. Besides Ohio State and NC State, most programs usually don't start accepting until the end of January, but interview requests should be coming out soon for the places that do interview. I don't think anyone gets in everywhere, especially international students. You have already done well and you still have 7 schools to go.

Florida State's deadline is Feb 1, you could fill out the application and wait to pay the application fee until later. They have a biostat Ph.D. but it is new(ish) I think. I really do think you will get in somewhere. You still have 4 schools that haven't started notified and you probably aren't out of the running for NCSU and Michigan because they don't look like they have admitted a full first round yet. I haven't seen anyone with a good profile in stats apply to multiple places and get all rejections on any of the applicant threads in recent years. My backup plan is to get a second undergraduate degree in economics or political science at my current university. I have a year of scholarship left that would cover my tuition, and luckily my parents are willing to help with living expenses for the second degree if I strike out. I doubt I could get a non-teaching job (that pays decent) on short notice so staying in school is basically my only option. I am also worried about the academic placement history of some of my programs. My backup plan after graduate school is industry, but I am not sure that is what I want. Hopefully, I can get in somewhere that won't hurt my chances on the academic job market. I had trouble finding programs that were both good fits for me and had success on placing graduates into TT jobs. I also don't know how competitive the academic job market is for statisticians compared to other fields (hopefully less competitive than math and the humanities). Anyone else thinking about going into academia?

There are two interview reports on results for uw biostat today. They were both international students. I think they got put up a few hours ago, so it's too early to tell if more will show up later today. Maybe based on here and here. Edited to avoid double posting: @Catsharknado last year they admitted MS starting in February, and no MS reports have come out.

I feel like the majority of people are freaking out. Some of them probably wouldn't admit it, but how can you not freak out over a major decision that you have to wait weeks or months to know the results. One of my programs historically sends out interview invitations around this time. Are those decisions going to come today or worse have they already happened? I don't know and it is driving me crazy. I kinda only want to get exactly one offer because that way I don't have to make a decision, but then again I choices would be nice. I don't even know what I want anymore. You definitely aren't alone.

An Ohio State stats acceptance just got put up. They were one of the first ones to send out decisions the past two years, with more following shortly after. Not sure if this indicates that decisions are going to start coming out for stats, but I am hopeful. I still probably have a month left to wait for decisions on most of my apps. I wish some of them had earlier deadlines so I wouldn't have to wait for this long. I am definitely jealous of the quick biostats decisions.

Also not in your field but I am in a similar situation. I am a math major interested in statistics but I haven't done a lot of formal statistics classes (3 so far). What I have been doing is using Google Scholar and searching for papers on things I am interested in. It is a bit of a learning curve to get Google Scholar to get you what you want, but through trial and error you can figure out what phrases you need to add to restrict the results to get what you want ( I would include "American literature" or something like that to filter out stuff from other fields). It might be best to go on computers on your campus (if possible) because it might be smart enough to help you find stuff you have access to. When I am on wifi on campus it normally automatically logs me into the library's resources, but that may not be the case everywhere. Google Scholar is usually pretty good at finding articles on the internet for free like maxhgns mentioned and is generally restricted to more academic work.

You might have more luck at https://www.collegeconfidential.com/. It's a mainly undergraduate forum. Scholarship information may come later, and I got my scholarship package a few months after admission. I don't think you can get a loan in the states without a cosigner for the thousands of dollars you would need. Federal work-study positions are for domestic students, and if you got a job (but I am not sure if you could on a visa) paying $8 an hour for 20 hours a week over a year would be $8320 a year. Both of those schools are incredibly expensive, but there acceptances rates are average (66.6% for New school, 53% for SIAC). You could probably get into and go to a cheaper school for half the cost (possibly even less). Even if you could get a $200k loan for a degree there that is a lot of money. If your plan is to stay in the US, it would be difficult to pay that much loans off working as a designer and you may have trouble getting a visa to work in the US. You may have to turn the offers down.

Possibly. Fill out the FAFSA and send it to your schools. Then they may be able to include a federal loan in your aid package if you qualify. You can do the FAFSA now with last year's tax information. There is some info here.

I don't think @Lexie122 was the one who got the admit, but someone else did on the other forum she mentioned. Plus an admit almost an entire month before other reports on gradcafe seems like its an outlier (weird circumstance we don't know about). My experience with reviewing historic dates is that previous records can only pin down future dates by a week or so. The nonresponse in the results survey plus the between-year variability of review times means that it is unlikely that UMich is done admitting. An acceptance is still an acceptance, even if it is not the first one. Mainly wrote this because I am trying to get my heart which is freaking out about my applications to listen to my brain.

Here is a clean copy of my signature if you want to copy it. If you didn't know you can change your signature under account settings. which can be found by clicking your username on the top right of a page. Statistics PhD Applicant Fall 2018 Applying (Submitted): Interview/Visit (/): Rejected (/): Waitlisted (/): Accepted (/): GRE: Q/V AWA, GPA: Overall, Upper-Level Math (major)

What stats programs in particular? Duke definitely does, and if you have seen interviews go out for Duke please tell me. Interview requests can be sent out at different times. It's still very early. It's not hopeless until you have a rejection letter.

No. I also applied to Duke stats. They went out 2nd week of January for the last three years. In 2015, they sent out (some) rejections a few days before invites. I am constantly checking my email hoping for an interview and the portal hoping not to have a rejection. I will post on results and here too if I hear anything. My guess is any day now since their semester starts on Wednesday. Where else are you applying?

I also applied to Baylor but for stats. January 17 is still over a week away. Plus people could have gotten interviews later than that but they didn’t respond to the survey. Duke stats usually sends interview request the 2nd week of January so I get how hard the waiting is. Maybe I should try to hibernate for the rest of break.

I feel exactly the same way. I hope that someday soon I can answer where I will be attending graduate school. I also need school to start up again, because I am spending way to much time here. In a couple of months, it will all be over. One acceptance is all we need.