regressionist

@Stat PhD Now Postdoc Thank you for your reply! There are a few notes I want to add about my background. Regarding my university- it is ranked top 1 in my country with great international faculty, and our alumni are currently doing PhD in such universities as Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Brown etc. My own experience showed that this year MS in Statistics admission seemed not so competitive - students from my class were accepted to UIUC, Columbia, Duke, Purdue - even with lower GPA than mine (3.2-3.4). I also was accepted to NYU MS in Data Science (acceptance rate <10%). Based on this fact I decided that the MS admission is not so hard - the only concern is funding. This makes me think that for me it is easier to got accepted to the Statistics program (I do not aim to the top uni such as Ivy) rather than CS, but may be my hypothesis is false. I don't familiar with PhD admission, but from your words, it seems that it differs very much from the MS admission. If PhD admission priorities GPA and advanced undergraduate coursework such as Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra etc - then my chances are very low I am not really sure whether I actually want to be a statistician, CS major is more interesting to me - but I do not have relevant courses in my transcript (such as Operating Systems, Computer Networks etc), and this makes my transition from math to CS harder. Not sure what to do now..

@omicrontrabb Thank you for your advice! Yes, I also thought about MS or PhD in CS, but the problem is that I don’t have relevant courses in my bachelor transcript - they are mostly from math/econ. On the other hand, my research experience is mostly related to cs - maybe this factor could possibly overweight the lack of cs coursework. I have covered several online courses- but not sure whether they could be counted by the grad admission. That is why I have some kind of mess in my head - not sure which program to choose in order to be accepted to PhD. PhD in data science could be ideal for me - but it is offered only in the limited number of universities, such as NYU, Columbia- and the chances of admission are very low given my unknown university and relatively low gpa.

Hi! I'm a recent graduate planning on applying to PhD programs in statistics or data science for Fall 2020. My research interest lies in the field of Natural Language Processing. Undergraduate Institution: Western-style university in Central Asia (Nazarbayev University) Majors: Mathematics, minor in Economics GPA: 3.57/4.0 (lower in the first year when my major was Chemical Engineering, and higher after I transferred to Math) Type of Student: White Female Relevant Courses: Math & Statistics: Calculus 1, 2, 3 (A, A, A) Linear Algebra (A) Probability (B) Applied Statistical Methods (A) Math Statistics (B) Regression Analysis (A-) Design of Experiments (A-) Intro to Proofs (B+) Real Analysis (B+) Nonlinear Optimization (A) Actuarial Math (A-) Computer Science: Programming for Scientists and Engineers (A) Performance and Data Structures (B+) Statistical Programming (A) Other: Econometrics (A) Economics of Financial Markets (B) Capstone Project in Math (A) GRE General: Q 167 (91%) , V 152 (56%), AW 3.5 (41%) Research Experience: My research was generally focused on the development of computationally efficient and interpretable algorithms for obtaining word embeddings and sentence embeddings. First publication: Springer "Lecture Notes in Computer Science", topic: NLP (word embeddings), first author, conference: CICLing 2019, top 10% of papers Second paper: topic: NLP (sentence embeddings), submitted to AAAI 2020 Research internship in South Korea (UNIST), topic: networks theory In plans: research internship at KAUST 1,5 years experience of working as RA Work Experience: Currently working as a Data Scientist in a Venture company Letters of Recommendation: One from the research advisor (I also took 3 classes from him) One from an academic advisor (He is currently working at the University of Minnesota) One from a professor of Nonlinear Optimization (previously he worked at University of British Columbia) Concerns: This year I was accepted to NYU MS in Data Science and UIUC MS in Statistics, but to the several financial circumstances, I was not able to join any for Fall 2019. That is why I changed my plan, and now I want to apply to the PhD program which could possibly provide the assistantship. I want to continue my research in the field of NLP, but after a search, I realized that most of the professors interested in NLP are working in CS departments (or even in linguistics), but my background is mostly related to Statistics. My dream university is NYU (Courant), but I am not sure about my chances. I will be happy to read your advice and grad schools suggestions. Thank you very much!

Hi! 1. Undergrad degree: major in Math (with Statistics track) and minor in Econ (Western-style university in Kazakhstan) 2. Undergrad GPA: 3.54 3. GRE scores: 167 Q, 152 V, 3 AW; IELTS 7.5 4. 1 publication (first author) in NLP, 1 research internship in South Korea, 1 working internship but no real work experience (just graduated from the university). I applied to only three universities in the US. Accepted: NYU MS in Data Science, UIUC MS in Statistics-Analytics Rejected: Columbia MS in DS

Yes, I responded on the same day.

Thank you! Yes, I also expect decisions about WL to start at the 15th - 20th of April. The strange thing is that people with higher GPA and GRE were rejected (according to gradcafe), but I was placed to WL. So now I don’t know what to expect from the admission committee.

Hi Louise! You said here that you were placed in the WL for NYU DS. Have you already received an admission? I am also in WL (NYU DS), but still waiting for the decision. I thought they would start sending updates in the middle of April. Thank you and congrats for your admissions!