justdeepwater

Undergrad Institution: Top 3 South Korean University Major: Mathematics and Computer Science (Double) GPA: 3.97/4.0 Math GPA: 4.0/4.0 Type of Student: International Asian male Relevant Courses (A+ unless stated otherwise): Undergraduate level: Calculus I,II, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, Analysis I, II (A), Modern Algebra I (A), II, Complex Analysis, Topology, Numerical Analysis, Discrete Mathematics, Graph Theory (A), Game Theory, Probability and Statistics, Probability Theory, Mathematical Statistics, Data Structures, Algorithms, Programming Languages, Automata Theory Graduate level: Real Analysis, Algebraic Topology, Combinatorics, Algebraic Geometry, Differential Geometry, Homological Algebra (A), Statistical Inference, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Computational Geometry TOEFL:115; 30/30/27/28 GRE: 162/170/4.5 GRE Subject Mathematics: N/A Programs Applying: Statistics PhD Research Experience: - virtually no experience; winter research intern in deep learning, some research on graph theory but yielded no result Work Experience: - 2 years as data scientist at a Korean IT company Teaching Experience: Two CS courses, two times math olympiad TA Recommendation Letters: Three; one from a math professor, one from CS professor (who supervised a theoretical CS project which was quite successful but is unrelated to statistics), one from industry boss (senior data scientist, CS PhD) Programming skills: C/C++, Java, Python, SQL, Kotlin, HTML, Javascript, ... Research Interests: theoretical and mathematical aspects of statistics and ML Others: Several awards from nationwide mathematics and programming competitions, several fellowships and scholarships, (probably) funding for graduate study Applying to: Statistics PhD Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, UChicago, UPenn, UWM, UMichigan, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, UCLA, ... Concerns: Not having relevant research experience/published papers etc. Not enough probability & statistics courses, no LoRs from statisticians Being an international student Hi everyone, this is my first post and I am quite worried about my PhD applications, because I could not find someone similar to me so I have no idea how strong or weak my application is. My biggest concern is the LoRs; I am quite sure that those letters will be strong, but they are not statisticians nor do they work in nearby fields. In fact, my interest was in pure mathematics 3 years ago, but 2 years of industry experience changed a lot (why I ended up in industry working as a data scientist is a rather complex story so I'd choose not to explain); this is why I didn't have meaningful interactions with statistics professors. These are my detailed questions: - Is it going to be a disadvantage not having any LoRs from statisticians? - As stated, I am thinking of getting the third LoR from my company boss. I also have another option of asking statistics professor who taught Probability and Statistics and Statistical Inference classes which I nearly aced. However, I thought the former is better because the professor has nothing much to say other than Did Well In Class, which is evident to the Committee from my transcript. Am I wrong? Should I get one from statistics professor even if the letter is going to simply say DWIC? I very much welcome any advice or feedback.