almostsurely

Thanks! Glad to hear it's not super frowned upon.

I've heard conflicting things on whether it's okay to state in a Statistics PhD personal statement that you ultimately want to return to industry. E.g: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/59607/is-it-a-bad-idea-to-say-in-my-statement-of-purpose-that-i-want-to-pursue-a-phd-i ^But, admittedly, this is for math. Maybe stats is a bit different? Do you guys have any thoughts/experience with this? Thanks!

Hi Bayessays, thanks for your honest input again. The B's were in an ECE/signal-processing oriented random processes class and in a grad level combinatorics class. So, they're weren't exactly "core", but they were definitely math classes...

Hey bayessays, thanks for the input! I do have all A's in the classes listed above, but I got 2 B's in math classes during my combined masters, which is why my first grad GPA is so horrendous. I did my MS remotely right in the middle of the pandemic, and did it quite quickly (1.5 years) which is a lousy excuse, but it's part of why I didn't get involved in anything. I'll try to target more schools similar to the second list. Thanks!

Hi all, I'd really appreciate some honest feedback on whether the set of schools I'm considering is realistic. (Information may or may not be fudged by some small epsilon for privacy reasons) Undergrad Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Major: Computer Science GPA: (Combined BS/MS degree) 3.88 undergrad, 3.55 grad (senioritis) Masters Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Major: Statistics GPA: 4.0 Research Experience: None Work Experience: Internships at Microsoft, Google, then 5 years working full-time split between two proprietary trading firms. Very limited modeling work, mostly software development. Letters of Recommendation: 2 from most recent trading firm, 1 from statistics professor, 1 from CS theory professor for whom I graded papers for 2 semesters Relevant Classes: lin alg, diffeq, abstract alg, real analysis, undergrad stat theory 1&2, grad mathematical stat, discrete math, algorithms I, algorithms II, stochastic processes, machine learning, financial mathematics, time series analysis, statistical learning, deep learning Schools I'm considering for PhD programs (non-biostat): UPenn, Columbia, Duke, UMich, University of Washington, Cornell, UW Madison UCLA, Texas A&M, UT Austin, NYU, Minnesota Twin Cities, Northwestern Which schools in the list above seem most realistic? Are there ones that I shouldn't even bother with? If all the above are out of reach, what schools would you suggest? Thanks!