agn3ktg

Update: I'm on an officially short waitlist at CMU. I am not trying to get my hopes up, but we'll see how it goes. Wish me luck!!

Hey, fellow sufferer! I only applied to top 20 schools in statistics {Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, ..., UCLA}. I think school reputation matters more for industry and program reputation matters more for academia in general because you will have access to more opportunities and leading researchers at higher-ranked programs (thus helps you get an academic job) and people in industry tend to have no idea about program-specific rankings. For example, UW is ranked 7 and Northwestern is ranked 37 in statistics, but the public recognition would be NU > UW since NU is considered a better school overall.

It is reassuring(?) to hear that there are people in the same boat. It is indeed a very brutal season, and I wasn't expecting cold, straight rejections–my letter writers were pretty confident that I would get in somewhere within top 20! I haven't considered applying to non-top 20 programs, so it's my fault for not diversifying my portfolio. I got no regrets other than ~$2500 I spent on apps, though. I'm definitely learning humility throughout this season, so I paid for life lessons lol.

OP here, lost my account and created a new one. Shotgunned at all top 20 statistics departments in the US, rejected from almost all of them with three/four pending apps. Guess I gotta try again next cycle with more papers. Better luck next time!