Dear all! I hope everyone and your families are healthy and positive at home. I am currently a Master's student in statistics. My bachelor's degree is also in statistics, which I earned under my current institution. I am applying for some PhD programs in statistics in Fall 2021. I have been doing research mostly in mixture models and missing data, and I want to continue to study those topics if I can end up in a PhD program. Also, I am really interested in Bayesian statistics and statistical computing in general. I have only studied Bayesian statistics myself, but I took and did pretty well in a computational statistics course from a professor who have known me really well, and she highly recommended me to consider some Bayesian departments (which I do). It would be awesome to have some Bayesian elements in my research.
I've looked over quite a number of profiles in our forum, and honestly, I think my profile isn't very strong. But hopefully, it is enough to give me a chance for the schools I list below (I try to be as much realistic as I can). I hope to receive some inputs or school recommendations outside of the list. Your help will be highly appreciated.
Undergrad & Grad Institution: State university in California Major(s): Statistics GPA: 3.71 (all upper-division and graduate math courses)
Type of Student: Asian permanent resident GRE General Test:
I will retake soon, but my current low GRE scores are:
V: 143
Q: 159
W: 4.0
Research Experience:
- I had 2-semester research experience in an industry project that yields a poster in Symposium on Data Science and Statistics. I was the first author in the poster.
- I am submitting a paper about mixture models to an international workshop while working towards my Master's thesis, and I may also be submitting another paper after my thesis is done in a few months.
- I volunteered as a research assistant that helped public researchers to analyze their data. Nothing really fancy and no publication.
Teaching Experience:
- I have been a teaching associate for 3 semesters. I graded homework for a statistical programming class. I also tutored for various math/stats courses under my department.
Other Experience:
- I helped a nursing student analyze data for her thesis. I am not sure if we could call this 'statistical consulting' experience.
Upper-division Courses:
- Linear Algebra (B), Financial Mathematics (B), Programming in SAS (B), Introduction to Proofs (A), Mathematical Modeling (A), Applied Probability and Statistics I (A+), Applied Probability and Statistics II (A+), Probability Theory (A), Mathematical Statistics (A-).
Graduate Courses:
- Statistical Programming in R (A), Linear Regression (B+), Time Series (B), Multivariate Statistics (A-), Computational Statistics (A+), Design & Analysis of Experiments (A), Categorical Data Analysis (A-).
In-progress Courses:
- Stochastic Processes, Bayesian Statistics, Advanced Calculus, Real Analysis (at my school, advanced calculus and real analysis are separate courses; real analysis is the standard analysis course at most schools, while advanced calculus is a bit lighter in proofs, but surveys many topics overlapped with real analysis) Applying to Where:
- University of California, Santa Cruz *
- University of California, Irvine *
- University of California, Riverside *
- Arizona State University
- University of New Mexico
- University of Nevada, Reno
- Baylor University
- Southern Methodist University
- The University of Texas at San Antonio
'*' means dream schools for me. Base on my research so far, these '*' schools also have faculty members doing research relevant to mine.
Please let me know what you guys think. Thank you so much.
