juilletmercredi

I'm having a difficult time understanding what the current issue is. It seems that the lab sharing issue has been resolved, and your adviser may have an unpleasant personality characteristic (the student-bashing, although that can be interpreted in many ways) that you can't change. The only issue that really leaves is making sure that you are working on the right project to ensure that you can graduate. You said: First, months before starting this project I had a video call meeting with my supervisor and agreed on the topic I will be working on. Considering that season is a factor for the main topic, we both agreed to have a small topic to be busy with while waiting for summer. However, when I had arrived it seems it was made clear to me that I will not be working on that main topic and will be focusing on the small topic instead. Which was already a sign for me to inform my university immediately but I did not since I was too confident that this should not take long and when summer comes, I will be doing on the agreed main topic. But setbacks after setbacks, this small topic is still not done. It's unclear to me how it was "made clear" that you will be working on the small topic and not the main topic. Regardless, you need to seek clarity. Talk to your supervisor and explicitly ask: "When we first started, we agreed that I'd be working on topic A. But recently, I've still been working on topic B that was supposed to be a pre-summer project only. Do you expect me to finish topic B before I can work on topic A, or can I hand off my project to another student, or is there some other way that I can go back to working on topic A as planned?" or something like that. Get a clear answer from your PI rather than trying to read the tea leaves. I don't know how a third-party university can limit the number of supervisees your PI has, and two seems unreasonable for a professor who is trying to operate a thriving lab. Are you already concerned about the level of supervision that your PI has given you, or have you already seen evidence that aren't getting what you need? Keep in mind that taking a few weeks for feedback on significant portions of your thesis is very normal in academia, and expecting daily contact with your PI (or even weekly) is going to be unrealistic. What do you feel like you're missing? Have you made explicit requests for support or assistance from your PI based on your actual needs (and are they realistic)? I'm not sure what your frustration is about the formal introductions, but that's not really your PI's job? You can easily introduce yourself to new faces in your PI's lab. But again, the problem that seems to have stemmed from that seems resolved. It's also not your PI's job to "thoroughly check" a student's manuscript to make sure they didn't make analysis errors. That's the student's job. While every PI is going to want to catch egregious mistakes or things that are obviously wrong, they're not going to re-run all of your analyses and make sure that you did the work correctly. (Or rather, they shouldn't!) At some point, the PI needs to trust that you're going to do the work correctly. If they can't, that probably means fewer projects and authorships for the student they can't trust. That said, it seems like a running theme is you not checking with the university when things aren't working the way you expect. So instead of writing your manuscript with your fingers crossed, you need to check with your university to make sure that they will accept your work. You don't want to waste a lot of time writing only to find out that your topic won't be accepted. PhD students don't usually supervise master's students, so assigning you to one of them may not have been appropriate. It could be that she has time and you just have too-high expectations for how much time she can give you. Whether or not she's interested in your topic is more or less irrelevant; the only relevant thing is will she support it.

No, not necessarily, as long as you can explain it. It's not outside the realm of possibility to say "After my PhD, I took off a year to take care of my elderly father and take care of some other family matters, but I am back and ready to enter the job market again" or something similar. However, the visa situation complicates things. Since you are international, if your goal is to work in Europe, you may find it difficult to re-enter the country for interviews and the like after you leave. And when you are in really heavy application mode, you might find yourself having to come out of pocket to fly in and out of the country. Or, worse, for some roles they may not want or need to sponsor visas, so you might find yourself locked out of certain roles because of that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't return home for some time - but it may mean that you need to return home for shorter than you want so that you can return to your current country for the job search; or it may mean you have to conduct your job search differently after you stay in your home country.

Getting on publications when you're on a project for 2 years or less is very much a matter of luck: you have to enter a project at the exact right time that the research is close to publication BUT is not so close that you don't have time to contribute meaningfully in a way that earns you an authorship. While publications can help you get into PhD programs, they aren't strictly necessary, so I'd focus most of your energy on trying to get into a lab where you can get meaningful research experience. Getting publications usually happens in one of three rough ways: you work on existing project that a professor, postdoc, or other graduate student is leading and gain authorship by helping conduct the research and/or write the resulting paper; you take a "chunk" of existing research that your PI has lying around and spearhead writing a paper on it, often with other students or postdocs; or you start your own project from scratch and write on it. As a master's student option 3 is usually not easily possible. Option 1 is where the luck really comes in. Option 2 is something you can actually talk to some PIs about when you start working in their lab - whether there are cool semi-independent projects they need someone to finish up or restart. Whether or not they can be finished in time to get a publication submitted by the time you apply to doctoral programs depends a lot on the project itself, but you have better chances of it than with option 3. One thing I'll note from your post is you seem to have a trend of putting blame on other folks. You maybe are just that unfortunate in that you had a string of "lazy" partners that offloaded their work onto you, an uninterested adviser, and now the trend is just starting up again. But if this is happening to you multiple times across 3+ projects, I'd start to wonder about your own place in all this, and whether there are habits or skills or practices you can engage in to increase the likelihood that you'll finish projects or get a publication.

I went to a PhD program where international research was very common, and most people had some kind of grant or assistantship that covered their research internationally. Lots of people got Fulbright grants to support their work; some people got NIH grants or fellowships; there are a variety of other less well-known ones that people got as well; and some people got small grants from the university or from their PI's grant to travel. I know a few people who paid small amounts to fund the very early stages of their research - mostly the travel costs - but most people had some kind of outside funding by the time they were doing regular or long-term research projects elsewhere. To be clear, though, most of them weren't traveling internationally for their work until at the earliest their second or third summer in graduate school. They concentrated on finishing coursework and did equivalent domestic projects (or data analysis) before going international. That was primarily to give them the time to get the grants, because as you've noticed, they take time and work! I'd see if you could talk to your PI or university department about the supplies, at the very least. Keep applying for grant funding and see if your university has a 'machine' or support for applying (mine offered very heavy and targeted support for applying to a bevy of fellowships and grants, including helping you find suitable ones that were good fits for your work). And consider if there's another way for you to get some research work done domestically for a time before you start traveling again, so you can do it on someone else's dime and not out of pocket.

I wrote my methods section first, because it was the easiest to write and by the time I was writing, I had already finished my data collection. I was doing data analysis simultaneously, so that part happened more iteratively - as I conducted my analyses I went back and edited sections to make them accurate to what I did. I wrote the results next, as that was second-easiest. Methods, data analysis, and results altogether took me from early September through mid-December to complete (including reviews of drafts and consultation with my advisers), so around 2.5 months. I wrote the intro/literature review next. (In mine, the intro and the literature review are two separate sections, but the intro is very short - like 6 pages). It took me about 2-3 months to do this, so I worked on it from January to March-ish. It was easier to do this because now I knew what I was introducing, so I tailored my lit review to refer very specifically to previous research/theoretical work that pointed to the precise kind of research and analyses I ended up doing. If you write your lit review before doing your methods and results, you may have to go back and edit a lot to tailor your lit review to your work. I didn't do an iterative review process with this - I drafted the entire thing and sent it as a huge complete chunk to my adviser. Perhaps risky, but I knew from previous experience that I wouldn't have months and months of comments back, so that's what I did. Then I wrote the discussion. This was the hardest part to write for me and I hated it, but I think it took me about a month - so I was done in April-ish. That was just enough time for me to get the comments from my lit review back, which I addressed in like 2-3 weeks, and then comments for my discussion, which I also addressed in maybe 1-2 weeks. I did not update my lit review unless I was aware that a new work had been published - so I didn't go looking for works that had been published in the last 2 months since I had submitted my draft. But I was receiving article alerts from journals and people also sometimes sent me articles, so if I received something and I knew where it would fit well, I wove it in.

If I were you, I'd leave academia and find something else. As was mentioned, a PhD doesn't provide job security and a road to financial security. Not in and of itself, and definitely not in the arts and humanities. Academia in those areas is really tight with a much larger supply than demand. And although you can definitely do things with a PhD in the arts and/or humanities outside of academia, those jobs are largely not made for nor exclusive to people with PhDs in those fields. You could probably do them with the degrees you currently have. I am a non-academic industry researcher. I did finish my PhD (I had this crisis inside of graduate school, and ultimately decided to finish) but when I was having the crisis, I loved the same things you love and disliked the same thing you dislike. My current job, NOT in academia, offers me a lot of the things that I liked - just in different formats than what I expected. I don't "teach" in the traditional sense (and not college students), but I manage people and I have lots of opportunities for teaching and advising in different formats (career development for my direct reports, teaching seminars and sessions at work, teaching my client/partner teams about research and different topics areas). I am more than supported if I want to go to conferences - I turn down travel opportunities - and I spend a lot of time writing and doing research. I've found that there are lots of jobs outside of academia that allow you to do one or more of these things, if you broaden your definition - or already have a pretty broad one - of how to scratch those itches. And if you like practical applications, to me that sounds like even more reason to look for non-academic work. You'll only miss that more in graduate school. I got my PhD in public health, and I sorely missed that all throughout - while I loved the research, I wanted to do more of the health education and promotion myself as well. I think the question now is - what do you want to do? It's easier to narrow yourself down to a couple of areas than it is to open the floodgates. Check out Versatile PhD if you haven't already, and get some suggestions there for things that folks from the arts and humanities do after leaving academia (they do a LOT of different things!). Do you want to continue doing research/scholarship in the humanities, or are you willing (or wanting) to go completely different? Do you want nonprofit/NGO/government agency type work or would you be happy to work in the private sector too? (They're not mutually exclusive, but I knew a lot of academics who were reluctant to work at for-profit corporations post-grad school.)

This is more dependent on your advisor and their expectations than graduate school as a whole. Some advisors have unreasonable expectations of graduate students, regardless of whether or not they are getting paid. Sometimes, students have to play along with those unreasonable expectations for a variety of reasons. Fortunately, most advisors are not like that. I did different things with my summers, although I was funded. I always conducted some research with my lab in the summers. Some summers I taught summer classes and worked in summer programs for undergrads - partially to make money and partially because I really like working with undergrads (especially those from underrepresented groups, which was the focus of the program I mostly worked in). One summer, I did an industry internship. The summer before my final year I worked on my dissertation proposal. My last summer I spent cleaning up my dissertation and planning my defense. I frequently did travel during the summers - I went to see family at least once a summer. Lots of other students used summers to take vacations as well. I do know some students who used their summers for research trips as well.

I want to pipe in and say that despite having to pay attention to these issues, renting is not super difficult or scary. I've rented apartments and/or houses all of my adult life (and actually, my family and I have lived in rentals almost all of my life period) and have yet to have any significant problems with maintenance, things falling apart, landlords, etc. You do need to do your research, but I also don't want anyone to read all this advice and feel super overwhelmed! One of the most important things to ask for when renting is about maintenance and upkeep: namely, who does it? If you go with an apartment or townhouse that is professionally managed by a rental company, usually they have a full-time maintenance person (or persons!) who are responsible for repairing things that go wrong. At some places, the maintenance staff even does routine stuff like changing your light bulbs in hard-to-reach places. One of the reasons I love renting is because I don't have to call any plumbers or anything like that: if it breaks, I report it and they send someone to fix it! When you rent a house, this can be more variable; some houses are still professionally managed and have similar systems. But with some house rentals (especially if the owner is renting it themselves) they may ask you to find and pay for a repair yourself and then reimburse you later. Personally, I would not want any kind of arrangement like that (I wouldn't want to get into an argument with a landlord about whether or not I broke it...) but it works for many people. I definitely didn't open/check any pipes when renting, haha. But I do check for electrical outlets flush to the wall and wiring issues - one, because well-maintained outlets (or lack thereof) can be a good indicator of how well-maintained a property is; and two, because I grew up in a house with electrical wiring issues and it's a drag. Insects are also an issue - termites are the worst, of course, but you also don't want a fire ant colony under your apartment (learned that the hard way. How did they get to the third floor???) or, bizarrely, an entire clan of ladybugs (my family home had that growing up. UGH.) In large cities there are also rodents to think about; most people in NYC will have a mouse once or twice, but it's the persistence that's a problem. Laundry in the unit is the ultimate dream of summer, but in some locales that's not possible or feasible on a graduate student salary. In NYC, for example, having laundry in the building itself may be pretty unlikely. However, wash & fold services in NYC are a dime a dozen and cheaper than they would be in other cities, so I'd think about that as an alternative and whether it makes living in a unit without laundry in the build doable. If you can't afford either, look to see where the closest laundromat is. Lugging a bunch of laundry 10 blocks is the worst, but pushing it in a little cart 2 blocks away? That's not so bad. (I also do not go home during the dry cycle. I'd bring some reading. Waiting for your clothes to finish is a great time to catch up on reading!)

It's actually pretty hard to plan this out in advance, as you often have to test out any system that you plan and sometimes the system you select ahead of time doesn't really work for you. Learning how to use Zotero and OneNote ahead of time are good tasks so you're not wasting brain power doing that mid-stream. You may want to check out other reference managers to make sure Zotero is the one you want to go with (Mendeley is a common favorite). I'm not sure that LaTeX is necessary, although it depends on your work style and also what field you're in. (I have a PhD in psychology and did not find it useful.) I'll actually go out on a limb and say that you might want to spend this free time just relaxing and doing some fun stuff. Your time is about to become greatly constrained, and graduate school can be a very stressful experience. When you look back, I'm willing to bet you'll be more likely to regret not enjoying yourself in your last months before graduate school than you are to regret picking up some small skill that can be easily picked up in graduate school.

I do not have direct experience with transferring. I had a colleague in my PhD cohort who transferred to our program after finishing three years in a different program. He had to start over - literally, start over. He finished with me in my cohort after six years. Your advisor passing away, and no one else in the department to adequately advise you, is probably a situation that warrants transferring. But there may be other options that you can quickly consider. You said that you got a new advisor that helped you, but they were unfamiliar with your topic. Is there another advisor in your department who is at least a little more familiar with your area and/or your work? If not, is it possible that someone in the department can serve as your nominal advisor for paperwork purposes, but you could have an outside person with expertise in your area serve as your actual advisor? This usually only works if you have an established relationship with an outside/external researcher, though. If none of those is possible or feasible, then transferring may be your best bet. Many PhD programs may make you repeat some coursework, though. You do need at least one person (and preferably, two people) from your current department who can vouch for you, though.

Michigan has great name value and resources as well. I work for a large tech company and we have more new hires from Michigan than we do from Columbia. Part of that is sheer size, but most of it is because Michigan has an excellent reputation as a research university that prepares great tech talent. I would not enter a master's program with the intention of transferring. You should either enter a program with the intent of staying in it, OR you should wait a year and reapply. The reason is because 'transferring' at the master's level is rarely a straightforward transfer - usually, graduate programs will accept up to a semester's worth of credit from the other program, and sometimes not even that. So you spend a whole year (and $$$) on your classes and then you only use half of that or less in your new program. Plus, the business analytics program at Columbia is only three semesters, so it'd be a waste to transfer when you could just spend one more semester and be done. The only way I would even consider this is an intra-university transfer - for example, going from Columbia's business analytics program into Columbia's data science program. The chances that you can use most of your existing coursework in the new program is much higher. (And actually, looking at it, it's really not - there's no overlap between the required first-year courses in the MSBA and the required core courses in the Columbia data science MS.) But I still wouldn't attempt it, personally - I'd say that if you 100% knew you wanted a data science program, then choose Michigan or wait another year and reapply. I was trying to do a straight comparison between the programs, but it's difficult. At first and second glance, the Michigan program seems more technical and more of a straight/traditional data science program. But Columbia's industrial engineering/operations research department is very technical and well-respected, and a lot of the classes that have names that seem less deep in statistics actually might be quite deep and technical. I think it's probably mostly dependent upon the electives you choose to flesh out your Columbia program - you could theoretically take really technical coursework (like Bayesian Modeling & Computation, Applied Multivariate Statistics, or Data Mining for Engineers) or less so (like Managerial Negotiations, or U.S. Healthcare System, or New Product Development). Michigan doesn't have as many diverse electives - the ones you can take are all clearly focused on statistics and computer science. I think a lot of this is also dependent upon the type of internship you do over the summer, because that's where you'll learn the tools and skills to solidify the knowledge and make you more appealing to employers. But you could get a great internship from either place.

For posterity, this depends on the employer. Most employers aren't going to be willing to wait more than a few weeks. But employers/teams that are used to hiring academics and PhDs are sometimes willing to wait a little longer, although usually not more than a few months (2-3 max, usually). Four to five months would be too long for most employers, but this is a university, and they might be more or less expecting you to start on an academic year schedule anyway.

My PhD is in public health. Yes, JHU's school of public health is ranked #1 in the field, but different schools and programs have strengths in different areas, and I wouldn't automatically go to JHU just because it's number 1. I chose Columbia (#4) over JHU because of its strengths in my research area, and I didn't even bother applying to Harvard (#2) because none of its concentrations or research appealed to me. However, if expense is your primary concern, that doesn't seem to set JHU apart. UPenn's MPH tuition is easily $40K a year, which for a 2-year program will come out to $80K (not including living expenses). JHU's 11-month MPH program is $70K. They're not that different in price. Drexel and Temple are both considerably cheaper for their whole program. If you intend to live in Philadelphia after you graduate, there's also something to be said for the local networking/connections you can make there if you stay.

It's not even just the prestige (and with the prestige of Oxford, I really don't think you'd have an issue breaking into the academic market stateside) but it's also the fact that your research doesn't match at Toronto but does at Oxford. Who are these people who are suggesting that you don't move to Oxford?

Yeah, I'm going to agree with the above sentiments - it doesn't sound like your daughter is shying away because it's too hard; it sounds like she is not interested in economics and doesn't want the emphasis on economics at JHU. The economics won't 'enhance' her career if she doesn't want to do anything economics-related. I'm also kind of curious about your thoughts on what makes a school "transformational". International experience alone doesn't do that. George Washington has one of the best and most well-respected public policy programs in the world. I certainly wouldn't characterize GW as "easier". I do not agree that a top-notch institution doesn't matter after undergrad (on the contrary, your graduate degree matters a lot more than your undergrad degree, especially in certain fields), but GWU is definitely top-notch in this area.

Yes, I would absolutely contact your programs of interest and ask if that changes things. POIs for sure, but I'd also contact the departmental secretary in each department and they can direct you to the appropriate person who can officially reconsider your application.

No, unless the program explicitly says otherwise. The purpose of a deferral is not for you to eliminate any risk to yourself while you shop around for other options. The purpose of a deferral is for you to hold a spot that you know (or are reasonably sure) you intend to take while you take care of either unforeseen circumstances or something that will enhance your studentship. For example, lots of students defer to complete military service; others defer for medical or family reasons; still others might defer because they got a Fulbright or into the Peace Corps. If you defer for the first reason, you're tying up a spot that the university could grant to another student when you're not even sure you will go (and actually, are pretty sure you won't attend, unless you get nothing better). Now, whether or not you do it is a different question. But that's not what deferrals are intended for, and is the reason some universities actually limit the reasons you can take a deferral.

Look at the curriculum and required course sequences. There may be 10+ courses in human rights at Harvard, but how many of them will you actually be able to take, after you factor in required courses and any divisional or special requirements? However, I will also say that I wouldn't take size as a sole determination of how personalized your experience will be, especially at well-resourced universities like Harvard and Princeton. Harvard may have more students, but they may also have more faculty members, greater personnel numbers in the career center, bigger spaces, etc. You may get just as much or even more personal attention at Harvard as you would at Princeton as long as they have the resources for that. I also wouldn't assume that accessing things may be harder, because your classmates' interests may be much more diverse. For example, Harvard may have 200 MPP students but they may make up their class so that you've got 50 interested in human rights, 30 interested in public finance, 70 interested in development, etc. So for the human rights-related stuff, you may be competing with the same amount or fewer students as you would at Princeton - but for more resources. Also, 200 is still a small enough number that I don't think you'll get "lost in the crowd" unless you are an especially timid, shy person. If you're not going into any debt I'd say it's really up to you and your preferences. Both are competitive and excellent programs. $18K is quite a bit to leave in your savings, but it could be worth it for you. Personally, I know that for a master's program I would prefer a bigger program with more opportunities - more networking, and more chances to really personalize my experience.

What do you want to do? Work in industrial engineering? What I'd suggest you do is check out the prerequisites for master's degrees in industrial engineering at several different colleges/universities. What do they require? If all of them require that you have a bachelor's in engineering, you have your answer: you'll need a second bachelor's. If they don't require that you have a bachelor's in engineering BUT they require so much engineering coursework as prereqs that you essentially need a second bachelor's, then you should also probably just go for the BS. But if there are some good programs that will admit you after taking some math, science, and engineering classes, it may make sense for you to take those as a non-degree student and then try an MS program.

In academia...not really. It's going to be more about the university and program itself; Duke is pretty well-respected in health. In industry/job market - maybe a little, although where you go outweighs that. For example, Johns Hopkins offers MHS degrees instead of an MPH for their applicants with no experience, but it's also Johns Hopkins, so few people care that it's not an MPH. I'm from Atlanta, and I went to undergrad there. I also got into Emory's MPH program (and only turned it down because I got into a PhD program at Columbia; otherwise I totally would've gone there). Atlanta is a great city - vibrant with lots to do, but not outrageously expensive (yet). There are so many young professionals in the Atlanta area to socialize with and make connections. And of course, there are tons of public health jobs in Atlanta, which makes interning and networking easier. It is quite spread out and a car makes everything easier; I wouldn't advise living in Atlanta without one, personally. Michigan also has an excellent MPH program. I have lots of friends who went to Michigan and they all love Ann Arbor; half of them are trying to get back there in some shape or form, including a couple of Michigan alumni I know who said they want to retire there lol. It is a college town but there are business and companies that have outposts there because of Michigan. I don't know much about Boston - never been - but BU does have a great MPH program too.

These are all very personal decisions and considerations. It's really up to you what you think is most important, and it depends on your level of tolerance for certain things. I know people who would rather live in a hole in the wall in order to do the exact research they want to do, and others who are more willing to make compromises so they can live somewhere exciting for five years. But let's dig apart your impressions. I am having some difficulty understanding how you say that you like the school and program at School B better than School A, when you had great interviews and love the research at School A but didn't like talking to the faculty at School B. In graduate school, your department basically is your experience; the overall university matters a whole lot less and is mostly important in terms of resources to allow you to do your degree (e.g. libraries, facilities, connected departments). What is it that gives you the impression that you like School B overall better? As for the degree program - I'd need a little more information about that, because it might not matter depending on what the coursework is. For example, one could be a PhD in organizational behavior and the other could be in industrial-organizational psychology, but at the core the coursework, research, and post-graduation opportunities might be nearly identical. So it wouldn't matter than the exact program name is a little different. But you might have something like "business analytics" vs. "data science," which could be functionally very different even though they have some similarities - where a data science degree typically gives you more technical education and prepares you for different kinds of positions than a business analytics degree. As for your concerns about safety - most big cities in the United States are actually quite safe, and concerns about safety in specific areas are often due more to unfamiliarity than anything else. Not saying that your concerns are not valid, but I'd talk to some students who live in the area to get their thoughts.

Never do a PhD without funding. While you're waiting for other programs, contact CMU and Berkeley and ask them how other students have typically funded themselves. There are a few programs that do not technically fund their students centrally, but students are funded from year 1 by their PIs. Usually that information is communicated when you're accepted, though, so if you haven't gotten that yet it's still a little iffy. If most people at CMU are receiving fellowships to cover their costs and you didn't, I'd take that as a bad sign and turn down the program.

I work in the tech industry and we employ a tremendous number of data scientists. Michigan has enormous name value and resources; I'd be willing to bet that my large tech company employs more Michigan alum than Columbia alum (probably by sheer numbers, but their alumni network is very, very strong!). The geographical location of Columbia is a huge boon when it comes to internships or part-time jobs or networking, but lots of companies come recruiting at Michigan. I think the important thing is the actual education you'd get. I don't know about Columbia's business analytics program, but some business analytics programs are less technical and more about understanding the basics - you get a little business and a little statistics/CS, but not enough of the latter to be a full data scientist unless you do a lot of additional work. So I'd look into the curriculum and ask about post-graduation placement at the program to understand what kinds of roles people do afterwards.

Well, I think it depends on what you want to do post-graduation and how bored, exactly, you think you'd be in a small town. I did my PhD in a very large city and it was a great experience; I wouldn't trade it for the world. I did my postdoctoral fellowship for one year in a small college town (bigger than Ames, and within 3-4 hours' driving distance of several large cities), and while it was OK for a short period and there were some very charming things about living in a small college town, I remember thinking I was glad I didn't do a PhD in a small town like that. It was also one reason I exited academia - I knew I didn't want to end up teaching in a small college town indefinitely. However, there are some small college towns - like Ann Arbor and Ithaca - that I've heard offer amazing experiences. Not everyone loves urban life, and small towns are much less expensive. But most importantly, if academia is your aim, a higher-ranked program is usually better for placement. In statistics it may not matter as much - there's high demand for statistics PhDs, and Ohio State's program is still very good. But it still has an effect! Have you visited either? I would strongly encourage visiting if you can, and see if you can picture yourself living there.

Is your master's in a related field, or an unrelated one? Particularly if you've only applied to 3 programs this year, I'd personally encourage you not to take an unfunded MA and just apply again next year to a wider range of schools.