csheehan10

There's been so few posts it's quite hard to say. 3 interviews late january, one rejection 4th february and 3 acceptances last week really isn't much to extrapolate on given how many people will apply (and presumably a lot of the applicants use gradcafe going by other universities' results).

I think Chicago are done - I got a rejection anyway.

As the deadline for Columbia Stats PhD was a lot later than many other universities (14th January) should we expect them to be much later in deciding?

Stats

Rejected from Berkeley this morning. Oh well...

I definitely don't think a Canadian or European masters would be seen as a step down. America has a lot of the top ranked universities, but a high ranking one in France should be seen as just as good as a similarly ranked one in the States. For example, Université PSL and the Sorbonne are both ranked in the top 30 in the world for maths, and in the top 40 for stats by QS. A masters at either of these would certainly not be seen as a weakness, especially since they are all taught through French. One thing to note is a separate Statistics department is less common in France, so most of the relevant programmes are mathematics masters where you could choose a lot of stats options.

No prob haha we're all a bit anxious. If you do end up emailing let me know what they say!

@Lilly187 I imagine they give a few offers to their top candidates first, and see how many of those accept before they give more offers. Given how many people are applying to grad school this year and how funding might be lower, they are probably being careful to not end up with too many students. My best guess is it's not a great sign to not hear anything yet as it means I wasn't one of their very top candidates, but it's not terrible either - I haven't been rejected yet, so holding out hope. A graduate admissions committee member did an AMA on reddit a few weeks ago and he said for PhD applications, no news is good news until the end of February.

Anyone know anything about the posters saying they have interviews for Harvard Stats PhD? Results from previous years never mention interviews.

Yeah would like to know this too @Lilly187

Yeah I would agree with the previous poster, as long as you don't massively screw things up you should be very competitive for any top PhD programme.

If you can take real analysis earlier that'd be great, but I wouldn't delay applying - as long as you're taking it while you apply, it will appear on your transcript. You may as well give it a go and apply for fall 22, and if it doesn't work out you can still apply for fall 23. This being said, if you do get the option to take real analysis in the spring or summer that would be advisable.

Not sure how important it is for final decisions but if you name a specific faculty member, that person can decide to interview you informally even if there isn't a formal interview from the admissions committee

Do you mind sharing which subfield you are interested in researching?

@mangobear @frequentist were you contacted by the faculty you mentioned in your SOP or just general admissions people? I've applied to Berkeley stats too but haven't heard anything yet

Your profile looks quite strong. Not entirely sure how to advise you on whether the schools you've chosen are realistic or not, as I'm not from the US myself. On the question of how to improve, I would definitely say to take real analysis - even if you want to do social science statistics, if you are applying for a stats programme rather than a social science one, professors want to see a fair bit of proof based maths education. This isn't a critical point, but if you are going to self study one of SPSS or Python, choose Python.

How common are interviews for statistics phd programmes? Most of the programme websites don't give any indication at all. And for those that do interview, when should we expect to hear about them?

I'm applying for statistics phd programmes at the moment too. Sorry to hear you got a rejection already! Given that it happened that quickly I would guess you just didn't hit their minimum requirements (e.g. GRE/GPA too low or something) and got rejected by the system automatically rather than have a professor read and reject you.