CityofAngels

Started high, dropped heavily, picked back up. I'll see if I know anyone who knows anyone in academia. Do you have any opinions on how many rec letters can be from people who have worked with me in industry? I think I'd honestly struggle to find a professor who remembers me whereas there's no shortage of people who have worked with me and loved me.

Undergrad institution: Top 5 US Majors: Engineering, Physics GPA: Probably ~2.7/4.0? I haven't checked since sophomore year of college. Programs Interested In: MS in Statistics/Data Science/Operations Research GRE: 339/340, haven't gotten writing back yet Recommendations: 2 stellar, need to figure out who's doing the 3rd Professional Experience: Data Scientist at well known tech company Publications/work in the field: 2 internal white papers (new method of optimizing multi-armed bandits for rewards that undergo changes with punctuated equilibrium, modeling customer lifetime value when purchasing spend isn't based off of Fader's gamma-gamma model) These probably fall more under the field of operations research/data science than pure stat but whatever. Current list - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Chicago, Duke, NYU, UCLA, Georgia Tech, Brown, CMU. I've got some legacy at two of them and attended a third, if that matters at all for grad school. Basically, my GPA is horrendous because I was majoring in two things I really didn't care about and I was/am a dumb kid, but I think the work I've done in the field since has been pretty damn good. I'm wondering if the GPA is a hard disqualification and what I can do about it at this point besides try and push out more formalized papers based on the stuff I've been doing at work. I'm also curious if anyone has opinions on the competitiveness of Data Science programs. I know they tend to have pretty low acceptance rates, but it seems plausible that's just because it's an overly hyped field that people are trying to get into. Much thanks in advance. If I'm about to waste a couple grand, let me know now lol