Olymerase

I'm hoping to apply for an MS in Biostatistics at UF next year, so I need to start thinking about how to cultivate LOR-worthy relationships with my professors. The problem is, UF is huge. The classes are huge. You're lost in a sea of hundreds. Many of my professors outright have "Zero LOR" policies because they just can't handle being bombarded with 70, 80, 100+ requests for LORs every year. The second problem is, it's Biostats. There aren't really any prelim biostats classes I can take right now - just bio, math, and stats classes - so I can't really get amazing letters from people actually IN that field. It would be cool if I was an econ major, had econ professors, and was applying for an econ MS. But that's not the case. My LORs would be from molecular bio professors, or the professor of a Calc 2 class with 400+ students. I have a couple of professors from past years that would probably write me decent letters, but they just aren't in the biostats field at all. They are in the softer life sciences. So yeah, not really sure how to overcome the problem of being in massive classes where professors make themselves unavailable to any type of impression that might garner a decent LOR. Are MS applicants generally expected to KNOW the professors personally, or is it more of a "This student had good grades, was proactive in communicating with me about course content, generally a solid A student." ....help

Hi all. My first post here! I'm a 3rd year undergrad at UF and planning to apply to UF's M.S. in Biostatistics next year. I have a strong GPA and relevant coursework and some light research experience (co-authored one paper) in biostats, but I have zero internships and really no experience in the biostats, public health/epidemiology, or pharmaceuticals fields... I've applied to a small handful of internships for Summer 2019 that seem to be relevant but I'm not going to bank on being accepted to any of them. I just feel like my application is going to be lacking something huge because of this. Are internships/field experience really expected for fields like Biostats, with a relatively limited number of options out there? There are also some summer programs in Biostats at different universities, but they are all like 10-week full-time research programs (or diversity camps in most cases) across the country and I don't think they're quite the same thing as an internship - should I apply to some of these or is it just a waste of time/money when I could instead spend the summer taking required pre-requisites and studying for the GRE? Thanks all. I'm sort of new to the grad-school process as I spent the first 2 years of undergrad in a pre-med mindset only to finally realize that is not what I truly want to do.