biostat_prof

With those credentials my guess is that you will be accepted somewhere. I hate to say it, but being female helps quite a bit when you're applying to stat departments (this is much less true in biostatistics). That said, as other posters have stated, you really do need to take analysis (preferably a year-long course) and perhaps an advanced linear algebra class. It's hard to say where to apply without knowing your full profile. If you get A's in analysis, do well on the GRE, and get a third stronger letter, you will be competitive almost everywhere. If you don't do all of these three things, then it becomes increasingly more challenging. Good luck.

Just to be clear, I am only speaking for my own department that can only admit a very small number of international applicants for various reasons. Given that competition for this very small number of slots is so intense, we simply don't admit international students who attended schools that we're not familiar with unless their files are absolutely extraordinary. (I can't remember this happening even once in the past 5-6 years.) This certainly isn't true everywhere, however. Historically I know Stanford admitted very few domestic students because they have plenty of money (and as a private school they don't have to worry about in-state tuition) and the applications from overseas are generally stronger. Having said that, at virtually any school it will be much more difficult to be admitted as a foreign student simply due to the fact that there are many more foreign applicants and some funding options (particularly NIH training grants) are only open to U.S. citizens/permanent residents. It's even worse at state schools, since foreign students are usually never eligible for in-state tuition, making them even more expensive. So my goal is not to discourage anyone from applying, but I also want people to be realistic about their chances. If you are a foreign applicant and your credentials are anything less than extraordinary, you should apply very, very broadly. And honestly, if you attended a foreign institution that doesn't have a track record of sending students to top-ranked PhD programs in the U.S., you should look at MS programs as well, because you may have trouble finding any PhD program willing to admit you with funding if they aren't familiar with your school.

From my point of view, the most important criterion for comparing the "difficulty" of qualifying exams is that passing rate, and I don't think any of these schools make that number public. I'm not super familiar with the curriculum at any of these schools (outside of my own department), but my impression is that Hopkins requires more advanced theory than the other schools on the list whereas Harvard requires significantly less. I don't see a major difference in the level of knowledge one is expected to have to pass the exams at UW/UNC/Michigan, although I couldn't tell you how that translates into the difficulty of the actual exam.

As others have said, definitely take advanced calculus. That is a no-brainer. If you don't have that on your transcript, many (most?) programs will just trash your application immediately. It probably won't make a difference which one of the other two classes you take.

In my department, it is unusual to admit students who don't have mostly (if not entirely) A's in their advanced math courses unless you're an underrepresented minority. This isn't a hard and fast rule, though. If you're coming from (for example) Chicago or CMU (two good undergraduate programs that are known for grade deflation), we'll be much more forgiving of lower grades. And recommendations are very important for providing context. A person with a few B's but with a recommendation letter saying that this is the highest GPA in the department in recent years will be viewed more favorably than someone with all A's at a school that hands out A's like candy. But in general it's going to be tough to be admitted without a very high GPA unless you have some really strong letters or something else that sets your application apart (or you're an underrepresented minority, in which case it's a completely different game). At my department, we have so little funding for foreign students these days that honestly we pretty much don't admit foreign students unless they come from a couple universities that are well-known to produce excellent students (Tsinghua, Peking, Hong Kong University, and Indian Statistical Institute jump to mind immediately; there may be a few others). If you didn't go to one of those universities, well, I hope you have recommendation letters saying that you're the best student in history and you have a couple JASA papers on your CV, because that's probably the only way you have a chance. We could probably fill our quota of foreign students several times over with only students from Tsinghua/Peking, so there just isn't much incentive to take a chance on students from a school we've never heard of. If you're a foreign national that attended a U.S. university, well, you'll still be considered, but there is almost no margin for error. Your GPA, test scores, and recommendations all need to be just about perfect.

As I said in my earlier post, I agree that if a department has a history of admitting PhD students out of its MS program and one likes the idea of getting a PhD at that particular department, that changes the equation a bit. But every department is different in this regard. Some departments basically admit any MS student who performs well into their PhD program whereas other departments don't favor their current MS students at all. So make sure you know what the department's policy is when making this type of decision.

Is taking more math classes not an option? Honestly neither computer science nor stat will do much to help you with MS admissions in most departments. Taking some sort of analysis or theoretical statistics course would be the best thing to do if your goal is to get admitted to the best grad program possible. If it's not, then I would just take whatever interests you. Neither choice is likely to have much impact on your admissions chances or your career options.

I just got back from ENAR last week, and I know many people are trying to make decisions about where to attend grad school right now. I thought I would give people one more data point to consider, namely the number of ENAR student paper award winners from each department. For those of you who are not familiar with ENAR, it is the biggest biostatistics conference in the country. Every year ENAR hosts a student paper award competition wherein students submit papers (typically a subset of their dissertation) that are evaluated (blindly) by faculty at various schools. This year there were 20 winners out of (I think) about 160 entries. It is interesting to observe which schools produce the largest number of winners, because it gives some insight into which programs are the "best." At the end of the day, the biggest advantage of attending a "good" department is that you will have more opportunities to do high-impact research. If you win an ENAR student paper award, that suggests that faculty familiar with your research think that it is good research, so other things being equal you would expect "good" departments to produce more student paper award winners. Having said that, there are some major limitations to these results, as there are with almost all rankings of graduate programs. One major limitation is the fact that West Coast schools typically do not attend ENAR. (The western schools usually attend WNAR instead.) So the lack of any winners from UW, Berkeley, and UCLA (and any other western departments) is mainly due to the fact that they don't typically send students to this conference. Also, larger departments are obviously more likely to have winners than smaller departments. And it's possible that some departments are more likely to encourage students to apply for these awards. I have no idea what the denominators are for the number of students at each department who applied. Also, this data is noisy given the small sample size. So interpret these numbers cautiously. But it gives you some idea of which schools have students that are producing good research. So without further ado, here are the numbers of student paper award winners by department for 2012-2014: 2014 UNC: 7 Minnesota: 3 Hopkins: 2 Penn: 2 Wisconsin: 2 Florida State: 1 Harvard: 1 Michigan: 1 Rice: 1 2013 UNC: 4 Hopkins: 3 Michigan: 3 Harvard: 2 NC State: 2 Florida: 1 Florida State: 1 Pitt: 1 Temple: 1 Waterloo: 1 Yale: 1 2012 UNC: 5 Hopkins: 3 Harvard: 2 Pitt: 2 Florida: 1 Florida State: 1 Michigan: 1 Minnesota: 1 NICHD: 1 Penn: 1 Texas A&M: 1 If anyone wants to look at the numbers from even farther book, you can do download the ENAR program books, which are available online: http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm The numbers are mostly consistent with conventional wisdom, with Harvard, Hopkins, UNC, and Michigan consistently producing the largest numbers of winners. UNC is a bit of an outlier. I've gone on record as saying that UNC is underranked by USNWR, and I like to think these numbers support that claim. Granted, I don't think UNC is quite as good as these numbers make them look. I have to wonder if they encourage more students to enter this competition (or just send more students to ENAR period). But I do stand by my claim that I certainly wouldn't rank UNC (or Michigan, for that matter) on a "lower tier" than UW/Harvard/Hopkins.

My guess is that you will do fine coming out of either program. I would probably go for the cheapest option, honestly, although Stanford might be a better choice if you are thinking of going for a PhD afterward.

I don't want to discourage anyone from posting information that could help other applicants. However, I do think it is worth noting that you should not expect anonymity if you post as much detail as some people have posted on this thread. I'm pretty sure I could guess the real identity of a couple posters on this thread based on their applications to my department. So I guess I thought it was worth noting that if you post this much information on this thread, I recommend that you do not say anything here that you wouldn't want an admissions committee (or a faculty member in your future department) to read.

It's hard to know without knowing what programs have accepted you, but none of our MS students have any trouble finding jobs in their preferred market. I can think of one student who initially took a job in regulatory compliance because she couldn't find a job as a statistician in the smaller city where her husband worked, but they gave her a new job as a statistician within six months. If the programs where you are accepted are solid, my guess is that you'll have no trouble finding a job in DC.

If you want to PM me the names of the schools, I can try to give you more detailed advice. I'm guessing that school #2 is UNC, because they are notorious for making one-year funding offers, and I've never heard of Michigan funding terminal MS students. But I would absolutely take less debt at UNC than $90k in debt at Harvard/Washington. Honestly, I'm not convinced that there is really much of a gap between the quality of the faculty at these three schools. (This is hardly a perfect metric, but at this year's ENAR student paper competition UNC absolutely killed Harvard and every other department on the East Coast.) I very highly doubt that there is any significant difference in MS job placement at those three schools. Unless visiting your husband more frequently is worth an extra $60k in debt, I would say this is a no brainer. For what it's worth, my students don't always tell me their starting salaries, but the ones who did have earned between $65k-$80k starting (and often increasing quite rapidly with a few years of experience). And none of them had any trouble finding jobs, and they usually found them in whatever market they wanted. Take it for what it's worth.

At the MS level, unless there is a required thesis/MS paper, I wouldn't worry too much about research fit, because most likely you won't be doing much of it. And honestly, if you apply to a PhD program, where you do your MS is very low on the list of things that we consider. You're much better off doing well at a lower-ranked department than doing poorly at a higher-ranked department. The only real benefit of a higher-ranked department if you later apply for a PhD program is that it might be slightly easier to get a recommendation letter from a well-known faculty member, but I would have a hard time recommending that you incur additional debt just for that. However, if you decide not to do a PhD (or don't get accepted to a program that you like), it's possible that job placement will be better at better-ranked programs. I don't know anything about the job placement at the schools you listed, but it's a question worth asking. Another consideration is if any of these schools regularly admit students to their PhD program from the MS track. If you are basically guaranteed admission to the PhD program if you do well in your MS classes, that would make me favor schools that give you that option. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Many of the top biostat departments (including Hopkins, UNC, and Michigan off the top of my head) have faculty profile pages that link to either Scopus or Google Scholar pages with lists of all the faculty member's publications. You want to see faculty with multiple (and ideally recent) publications in the top statistics journals, which are usually consider to be The Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, and The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society-Series B. The total number of publications and the total number of citations is also informative. This is more critical at lower-ranked schools, though. If you're looking at any of the top-ranked departments, there are usually plenty of strong faculty. If you are considering lower-ranked departments, however, a department with one very good faculty member whose work interests you may be a better option than a department with a large number of mediocre faculty. Just off the top of my head, while UCLA's stat department isn't ranked very highly by USNWR, Ker-Chau Li is an outstanding researcher and many of his students now have very good jobs.

In my experience it's very rare for advisors to turn away a student outright. However, they may sometimes tell a potential student that they have a lot of other students and hence won't have time to devote to them. But the only cases where I have heard of advisors turning students away is when the student has a poor academic record or a reputation of being difficult to work with. That said, sometimes there is strong pressure to work with a particular professor if that professor is willing to fund you and you don't have another funding source lined up. Rarely does that hurt you, though, except at the point where you may end up working on a project that isn't your preferred choice. Usually the best-funded professors also tend to be the most productive ones.