catchermiscount

Linear Algebra has nothing to do with politics. You should not waste your time on mathematics.

Save it for scope!

You're totally surpassing me in terms of "Curmudgeonly Old Bastard on Gradcafe" status. Attaboy.

The really annoying part about all of this is that Pitt is my favorite college for sports, and their really good quarterback recruit just switched his commitment to Vanderbilt. AND NOW THIS IS HAPPENING REGARDING PITT, TOO. Note: those of you that got into Pitt and go visit MUST get fries at the O. Just ask the students. They'll know.

I'm a big fan of the Princeton offense, and I think JT3 will get them turned around this year. The Big East is wide open.

So the professor that is in charge of admissions this year rocks up to me a couple of weeks ago and is like "Hey, I've heard good things about how you help out with recruitment and was wondering if you'd like to do it again." So I say yes, and then I go over to the professor that ran it last year and am like "GEE THANKS FOR GIVING ME RAVE REVIEWS NOW I HAVE TO DO RUSH AGAIN." And the professor is like "Dude, let's be honest. You were going to finagle your way into doing Rush one way or another. Don't come to my door with your lamentations." Then he mocked me for a while, as is his custom. Then I wept for a while and tried to prove that something is a diffeomorphism.

I am again deemed the low man on the Rochester grad student totem pole and accordingly have been named student Grand Poobah of All Things Rush. If any of you admits (whom I think I've contacted via PM pretty comprehensively, but lurkers persist) have questions, please PM me. I'm happy to start a dialogue. And for the non-admits, I'm sorry. The downside of being a post-application-season gradcafe citizen is that you get to know people that apply to your school that end up not getting in. In some instances, they've got time to kill and are persistent and then apply again, get in, AND THEN GO SOMEWHERE THEY LIKE BETTER. Not naming names BUT YOU MADE ME CRY SO HARD WHEN YOU SPURNED ME. But other times, you know that was the one chance to become their Brother or Sister in the Order of the Knights of Differential Topology, and it's a bummer, because you knew they'd be a fine Brother or Sister in the Order of the Knights Differential Topology. But, I guess if you do it right, the individualism in the business, when coupled with the cheapness of communication (and increasingly learning), means that we get to be colleagues all the same. This all sounds like bullsh*t to make things seem better, but it also happens to be true. CLEARLY WE ARE ALL GOING TO WRITE IMPORTANT PAPERS TOGETHER.

I'm now guessing this week.

But of course.

Ruined.

Also, thank you for the citation! Clearly my best work.

It varies a bit by school, though the basic structure is generally the one outlined above. Some schools have more structured programming (e.g. the comparativists each give a brief presentation on what they do, then the Americanists, and so on) than others. Others are pretty much a free-for-all: for example, at one of my rushes long ago, one of the recruiting coordinators declared that "the city is as big of a part of the pitch as anything, so go out and explore!" So then one goes out and explores for a few hours, and hopefully at the end of the exploration one is sober enough to make it back for a nice dinner. MADISON IS A REALLY FUN PLACE IS WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY OK In general, though, you can at the very least expect some one-on-ones with faculty of interest, some dinners with mingling, and some time spent with the grad students.

We have a rush date saved now, but I don't know how that maps into whether we have a list. I'll do some snooping.

This was some time ago, but I interviewed at Emory. My understanding was that there was a group of applications that had been admitted without the requirement of an interview and that there was a second pool of those to be interviewed. Among those that interviewed, some were not offered admission. Whether the interview itself was at all informative, I don't know. Again, this was a few years back, but that was my understanding.

More interesting scholarship can be found here.

Um.

I thought it was a fine piece of scholarship.

The sad part: in a few years' time, you will find yourself dancing in your desk chair because of how a ROC curve ended up looking. GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN, KIDS.

While it hasn't come up too much in this thread. it looks like Rochester will not be making decisions this week. Sounds like a slightly bigger pile than usual (though the pile is never very big relative to competitors). Anyway, one less thing to gnash teeth about. OH DEAR GOD LET ME GET INTO ROCHESTER SO THAT I CAN ENJOY COACHRJC'S WONDERFUL COMPANY AND ROCHESTER'S WONDERFUL WEATHER.

I wish there was a hard-and-fast answer to the question. There is not. It very much depends on where you're applying and what sort of punchline that you're selling about yourself. You have far more technical background than I did the first time I applied to grad school, and part of your itchiness stems from a lack of ignorance yielding a lack of bliss. Even if you didn't mention it explicitly or talk about how you might like to build upon it, people will notice that you have good background. Many of the undergraduates here are exposed to quite a bit of quantitative and theoretical stuff---I am shocked to see what kind of things are done in honors theses. But, my sense is that this is very much the exception to the rule. And you're right: while these students are laudable for doing interesting things with some amount of technique, they certainly don't know it at the level we would expect of a graduate student, so there is a lot of re-learning (or just learning in much more depth). I've never been on an adcom before. My sense is that, while it may be nice to demonstrate that you know what you're getting yourself into in terms of the technique in the writing sample/SoP, it's much more important to demonstrate that you have brain waves. Can you be critical, can you find an interesting question, can you place it into a scholarly conversation? Can you craft a compelling answer to the question, regardless of the tools you use to do so? Can you consider rival explanations to your answer and argue in favor of your own? I think that, if you did all of these things well, you could get away with the page numbers being the only quantitative stuff involved.

Completely anecdotally, many of the people that have struggled with our technical classes are those with too many preconceived notions of what statistics and theory are.

The further and further down the technical rabbit hole you go, the deeper and deeper the texts you read become. And yet, the deeper and deeper the texts are, the more and more they tell you that no prerequisite is required other than "mathematical sophistication," which isn't taught in any formal class. In another thread, RWGB---who is far more qualified to speak on these matters than I am---mentioned a good book on writing proofs. Proof-writing is a wonderful skill to develop in that it forces you to think about how assumptions and conclusions (whether you had them in mind to begin with or not) link together. The more sophisticated you are, the better you become at picking up skills as they are taught to you. So, in the event that you decide to cut costs and work on stuff by yourself, I would suggest that you pick up a basic math book (Simon and Blume, e.g.) and a basic proof-writing book (RWBG's suggestion was good, or The Nuts and Bolts of Proofs). The best case scenario is that this stuff becomes intuitive and fun---a play experience, really. As I read it, this advice might seem a little more suited for theory than for statistics. That's probably true in a very applied sense.

To try and keep spirits high during this recent run of low morale, I've been trying to come up with a comic sans XeTeX theme, but it's been hard to find the right math font to put with it. I'm half tempted to put all the math in wingdings since nobody reads the formal stuff anyway. I'll keep you guys apprised.

The same goes for answering questions about Rochester---and lots of good luck to all.

You should note that you are getting advice from somebody much further down the culinary rabbit hole than merely "having time."