I'm a senior at a liberal arts college thinking about several Operation Research PhD programs. My background is a math major, with some mixture of applied math, statistics and computer science stuff added. I'm mostly interested in optimization and control theory.
Here is my more detailed background.
Asian male international (it couldn't get any better)
Major: Math
Major GPA (math): 3.95 . Cumulative GPA: 3.7
GRE: havent taken yet
Courses: the more likely related stuff: (Math) ODE, Control Theory, Dynamical System, Numerical Analysis, Probability, Game Theory; (Statistics) Computational Statistics, Bayesian Stat - Monte Carlo Method and some more basic stuff; (Computer Science) Machine Learning, Algorithm, Theory of Computation and some programming courses. The rest are just the purely math courses: Multivariate Cal, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis, Complex Analysis, Functional Analysis, Analytic Number Theory, Measure Theory, etc.
Research Experience:
- A pure math REU (competitive program) doing probability theory and number theory
- An applied math REU (competitive program) doing optimization, control theory, PDE, numerical analysis.
- Over a year worth of research assistant working on math/applied math projects.
- A month internship doing data mining & computational statistics for a hedge fund.
- A year-long thesis on control theory.
Recs:
- One from a math professor (department chair) that I took 3 courses with. Probably a "do well in class" letter.
- One from a math professor/research advisor that I took 3 courses with + one summer REU and several months of research assistant, o-authored 2 journal papers with him but I'm unsure how supportive he'd be about me going for a OR PhD instead of a Math PhD.
- One from a REU research advisor, co-authored 3 (working) papers with him.
- One from a math professor/thesis advisor that I took 3 courses with.
Publications:
- 2 journal publications (professional journal) on probability theory and number theory.
- 3 working papers (Two of which are fairly close to journal submission. But it depends on how much time I have to spend in the next 4 months) on control theory, PDE, stochastic process.
Programs that I'm considering: (I appreciate any recommendation you guys feel more suitable for my area of interest/background?)
MIT OR
Stanford MS&E
Princeton ORFE
Berkeley IEOR
Northwestern IEMS
Columbia IEOR
How you guys feel about my chance at the above programs (please ignore my ignorance since I have very little idea on how competitive those programs are for OR)? My main concern is the lack of OR-related stuff in my background.
Thank you.
