Rossiney

Hello all, I’m trying to evaluate my profile so that I can apply for a PhD admission in Biostatistics/Computational Biology/Biomedical Informatics next cycle. I believe you all have much more experiences and better understanding about the program acceptance than I am! Thus, I hope you can help! I feel like I don’t have a strong background in pure math/statistics courses. Major: Chemical & Bio Engineering at a top ChemE University according to US News. Undergraduate GPA (so far): 4.0 Research Experiences: - First prize for a chemistry and data analytics city-level research competition and wrote a conference paper for it in high school. - At a community college, 1 year of biology research and have a conference paper at a Big University Research Symposium. My work was offered a funding but I graduated at that time so the students, who continued my work, have inherited. - I luckily got into a research group right after the first semester. I am the youngest and only undergraduate student to work along with other professors and scientists. - I had two co-author publications (third author). One of them is published on Nature’s family. - One of the most prestigious undergraduate research award at my school for my research proposal. It’s about biostatistics/public health and time series machine learning. I hope to have at least one 1st author publication before graduation. - I have been one of the developers for two dashboards, which have attracted millions of users since 2020. =>Totally, I have been doing research more than 4+ years. Internships: 2 full-time semesters of Data Scientist internship and on part-time contract from now until graduation. I’m mostly applying statistical tests and programming for plant diseases and growth. TA: for college math, statistics, chemistry, and physics Activities: actively participated in Student Government, Student Advisory Board, Ambassador, School Council, some data science clubs, etc. I hold many crucial positions there and made lots of progress/impacts before I left. Awards: as an international student, it has been a great challenge to achieve any award. However, I did try my best and build “good” reputation. I became the top 1st student in my 2-year college (I got the medal), some scholarships for excellent academic records, research awards, etc at my college and current university. GRE: I plan to not take this test. I just feel like I’m not a good standardized test taker. I’ll apply to programs that do not require GRE. LORs: 1 from my PI (super well-known in Computational Biology/Bioinformatics/Physics fields), 1 from a research scientist (he’s my mentor who I work closely with. He knows my abilities the most), 1 from a Senior Data Scientist/Biostatistician (she’s my current manager at my internship), 1 from a Senior Chemistry Scientist (she was my manager in other 6-month internship. she was always impressed with what I could do). Degree Classes: all Chemical Engineering classes (As). They’re all heavy diff eq and linear algebra based. College-math: all Calculus (A), Linear Algebra (A), Differential Eqs (A), Intro to Statistics (A), 3 gen chem and physics (A) University-classes: Probability & Statistics (A), three CS classes (As), 3 biology (As), biochem and organic chems (As) Data Analytics (grad course in the Fall) I realized that my courses are not competitive for the PhD after reading through lots of profile. Thus, I plan to take probability theory, real variables, and possibly proof-math in the Spring & Summer (all through UIUC NetMath). My university does not offer these classes over summer. I’ll be taking lots of classes, doing research, and working part-time at the same time next Spring and Summer. It seems to be a lot of work but I try to my best. I’m afraid my GPA may suffer a little bit. Are there any other recommendations and feedback for me? These are the schools I plan to apply: Super Ambitious: Harvard Biostatistics Stanford Biomedical Informatics MIT Computational Biology University of California Berkeley Computational Biology Some chances: University of Southern California Biostatistics Brown Biostatistics Washington University in St. Louis Biomedical Data Science Boston Biostatistics University of Wisconsin Biomedical Data Science University of Pittsburgh Biostatistics University of Minnesota Biostatistics if you have other school recommendations that fit my profile, please share! Am I too ambitious with my profile? Again, thank you so much for your reading!