Geococcyx

EDIT: Obligatory note that I'm not an expert, and my ability to judge who is and isn't a good researcher is neutered by my lack of knowledge of their in-field reputation, along with lack of any experience or particular knowledge of most of their papers. I can only really comment on Brown. Brown's program is, I guess, new in the grand scheme of things, but they aren't Vanderbilt/Duke biostatistics new -- they have actual alumni plural (and more on the order of 30 than, say, 2), so I wouldn't really worry too much about the age of the department. Obviously, one of the ways Brown stands out relative to some other departments is that they're very small -- I recall that they wanted somewhere between 4 and 6 incoming students this year (and even 6 seemed like a bit of a stretch) -- so if you are from a really small university or really enjoy lots of one-on-one advising, then that's something to consider. Since this isn't exactly NC State statistics size-wise, you aren't really at risk of "getting lost" amidst all the other students, if that is a concern of yours. Brown has quite a few good faculty by my estimation -- I know Dr. Gutman is a good researcher in causal inference, and Dr. Schmid (the department head) works on clinical trials and meta-analysis. Beyond them, Dr. Lorin Crawford is a rising star (enough so that I might even be a bit worried about how long he'll be at Brown), albeit Dr. Crawford is kinda splitting the difference between the biostatistics and computational biology departments -- if you care, Dr. Steingrimsson is also rising fast, so I hear. I can't really comment on everyone, but Dr. Eloyan, Dr. Duan, and Dr. Wu all seemed interesting as well. If you care, Brown's biostatistics department is located in their school of public health building, which is notable in the sense that you won't really be on the main campus (albeit there's not a long distance to travel to the main campus either). The state of Rhode Island seems to treat Brown like other states treat flagship public universities, so Brown has a lot of partnerships with hospitals and the state health apparatus. Just for my own curiosity's sake, did you not go to the Brown event back in January? You say you plan on visiting Brown, so is that a secondary visit of some sort?

It appears that there are Columbia Ph.D. acceptances listed on the results page, and at least one is from a domestic student (sometimes I think the international acceptances go out first, presumably for help accelerating paperwork), so I'm just assuming a rejection at this point.

Obligatory: I'm in this application cycle too, so if the smart folks end up posting in here, then my answer might as well be moot (and it might be moot regardless). You get admitted to departments rather than to professors' labs, so there's not too much reason for individual professors to care particularly about any contact you have with them, regardless of how nice or intelligent you appear when you talk to them. Other past applicants have asked about both contacting professors and about name-dropping potential advisors in your personal statement, and as I recall the answer has pretty much always amounted to "you'll be fine, don't contact them/namedrop them".

I apologize for double-posting, as well as for potentially being the bearer of bad news. However, if any of y'all were waiting for some finality regarding Johns Hopkins biostat, I think the decisions (rejections, I think, at this point) are up on the website, although I haven't gotten an email about it yet.

Did anyone rejected by Brown today go to the visit/interview day?

@BL250604 So far as I know, Ohio State's only visit day was this past week, and it's getting kinda late in the cycle. Bayessays mentioned that they offer people even in April sometimes, but if they might do so with you, then you need to start really researching them to decide how much you like it. As such, I'd say that you probably should call them to get a sense of what's going on with your application status. There are several people here who went to Ohio State's visit week -- I'm one, so you can DM me if you want a rundown of the visit, and I bet the others would be willing to offer their perspectives too if you asked.

@ducky500 Hard to say. Previous years suggests that they sometimes send out unfunded acceptances, which would probably kinda double as the waitlist -- you may get that instead. I'd say to at least give it a couple days before you totally assume a rejection (or even totally assume something other than an acceptance). In any case, hearing nothing is better than an outright rejection for now.

Yeah, measure theory would do you a lot more help admissions-wise than multivariate would. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure this meshes with everything the experts on here say.

Anyone else get an acceptance from Wisconsin addressed to "applicant's first name"? I'm assuming they just sent that to everybody who applied by mistake, but want to make sure. UPDATE: I emailed them, they said the offers are official if anyone else was confused. Sorry for cluttering the thread.

@Bayequentist As an applicant, I'd consider it a waitlisting, and probably move on if I had solid offers of similar stature. One of my professors mentioned that it's not all that rare for departments to throw a few unfunded offers out, although I gather from the forums that becomes more common as you go down the rankings. It's hard to guess the applicant and admit pools without knowing the school, though, considering its location (e.g. if it was UC Santa Barbara vs. Indiana) and its research/professor profile. @SkyHighway It's hard for me to know about how waitlists work with international vs. domestic students, but I got into Duke on Feb 7, which seems to be a week+ later than anyone else who got accepted, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally is a couple days after both Stanford and Cal statistics released. As such, I'm guessing I was on the waitlist, and just got accepted since they hadn't decided to release waitlistings yet. If so, that'd suggest both that several students may have already declined Duke, and that Duke might be pulling from the waitlist now. It's hard to know how much that would help your odds, though. Also, this is pure, pure conjecture, so on the whole I'd trust the actual veteran posters' comments about the likelihood (or lack thereof) of getting off waitlists.

@Monte Carlo That tends to happen on Duke's admissions page when you have issues with the cookies in your browser. Try a different browser (e.g. Microsoft Edge if you've abandoned it), I think it'll work.

It's not information that you (probably) haven't already seen, but it seems like Duke's been offering a few more admissions these past few years (as a proportion of the applicants). It seems like this might have been, in part, to combat some falling matriculation rates prior to 2017-18, which confuses me, since Duke seems prestigious enough to not have to worry too much about people accepting their offers. I have a few guesses as to why it might be (higher-ranked programs are getting larger, industry is more open to hiring undergrads, people in your position are more likely to choose Stanford/Berkeley over Duke these days so that they can be near Silicon Valley), but it's something I am interested in looking into a little more.

@jwlim07 Haven't heard anything, but I wouldn't really expect to hear before mid-March -- there are still a lot of campus visits that have to occur, and considering the size of NC State's accepted pool and waitlist, I figure that even if I was high on the waitlist, they'd need several students to turn them down just to start pulling from the waitlist, and then several more turn-downs to get to me.

Well, we have that one early CMU acceptance and two recent wait lists. Given previous years' results, that seemed to be about half the usual reports on gradcafe -- I'd like to think that means another batch is coming, but we might just have an abnormally low number of CMU admits with us this year -- a difference of ~1 Ph.D. admit and 1-2 waitlists in a cycle doesn't really convince me that we have another batch coming, I'd just prefer not to get rejected.

@galois If nothing else, any information you pass on via the forum could save them from answering another email or two (or more?) pretty soon. I wouldn't sweat it too much.

Between UW stat, Boston University biostat, UIUC stat a day or two ago, and even a couple reports from Emory biostat and Johns Hopkins biostat today, it seems like the Ph.D. rejections are starting to really ramp up. Best of luck to everyone effected (as well as to anyone recently rejected from one of many Master's programs). I guess we'll be seeing plenty more of these in the next few weeks.

@galois Which school are you hoping to ask about? For instance, Duke's visit day is 2 weeks from Friday, so if you wanted to know if you should think about keeping that time period open in case someone declines a spot, then I wouldn't think it would be a bad idea to ask pretty soon. (As usual, I'm very far from being an expert, so caveat emptor)

@Monte Carlo Based on their signature, Ph.D. (unfortunately, I'm not sure how one would turn on signatures on mobile devices, short of just switching to desktop version)

I see that some folks reported getting waitlisted by Carnegie Mellon yesterday and today. It looks like waitlists and acceptances came out at roughly the same time last year (and fairly similarly in 2017), so it'll be interesting to see if any of our forum superstars get accepted today. Congratulations to everyone who gets in, congratulations to those waitlisted too (with a special extra allocation of luck)!

@blehperson The admissions page uses a different, randomly generated password. Ask to retrieve it, copy it from your email. It seems they just use the error page for incorrect passwords too.

I'm sure you've looked, but I only saw one person who reported getting in off the waitlist in the last few years, an international student in 2015 who got accepted on April 14th after being waitlisted on February 7th of 2015. I'd guess from the relative paucity of people reporting being waitlisted that Stanford has a pretty short waitlist, so you don't have many people to compete against. Anecdotally, people do turn Stanford down. Over the summer, one professor we talked to told me that they left Stanford because they just didn't like the program, and at their new program met someone else who had (prior to enrolling) turned Stanford down for similar reasons. That was a while ago, and I don't really know anything about what issues they had with Stanford, but whatever those issues were aren't the point -- students will even turn down Stanford if they perceive somewhere else to be a better fit for them as a person, or if they have a specific research mentor they want to work with somewhere else, or any number of other factors. You're not guaranteed to get into Stanford, but given the apparent small size of the waitlist, you're in a good position. Find somewhere that's a good fit for you, and if Stanford calls, go find out if it's a good fit for you, and if it is, then congratulations!

@cyberwolfThere's plenty of time for admissions to come in -- quite a few schools don't even send out decisions until late February/early March. It's not time to start worrying just yet!

@cyberwolf It may not totally be out of the question, but at the interview day they said they were looking for 5 (maybe 6) Ph.D. students, and there were 15 students at the interviews. Good luck, sorry if you don't get in. If it's some consolation, a good 70-80% of students seemed to be from Boston/the Northeast, and generally were from pretty prestigious private schools, so there's a chance Brown loses a lot of the interviewed candidates to Harvard/JHU/other Ivies later on. For people who got accepted to Duke, how did you hear about financial aid/funding? I apparently got accepted just now (which seems strange already), and it just says I should have a note on the Duke admissions portal about TA duties and RA opportunities (which isn't there yet, hence my asking y'all). Maybe I'm just overly suspicious, but since I'm still trying to figure out if UNC biostat actually intends to offer me any funding or not, it seems better to compare notes.

I guess not. At the Brown interview day, they said they tried to get decisions out pretty fast. However, previous years' decisions seem to come out the first week of March, which doesn't seem terribly fast when Brown epi and health promotion are/have already sent out decisions per the results page (FWIW, I asked about that discrepancy, they seemed to think people wouldn't report until the grad school had cleared them and everything). I'm assuming my rejection because I heard on shorter notice than most people, so I figure I was only added once some preferred candidates couldn't come, but otherwise, if you were at the interview day and got invited on roughly Jan 12, then you can probably assume you're still in the running.

@Statmaniac My NCSU waitlist email came a week or so ago, but it did explicitly say I was waitlisted. Not sure what's up with the "still in review" e-mails.