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biostat_prof

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Let me put it this way: I have never seen a job opening in my life for a biostat position that wouldn't also consider someone with a stat degree. You could have a more difficult time if the job wanted someone with experience with (for example) survival analysis or longitudinal data analysis, which are two areas that are common in biostat curriculums but less common in stat curriculums. But I'm guessing very few (if any) jobs would trash your resume because it said stat rather than biostat. As for your second question, every job is different, but in general you will usually need a PhD to advance past a certain point. That said, the salary difference is usually less than you would think, and for most people it's questionable if the increased earning potential associated with a PhD is worth an extra 3-4 years out of the job market (particularly given that the job market for PhDs is typically much tighter).
  17. Honestly, I would try for the MS route at any school that will take you. I don't know much about admissions at any of the schools you listed, but my sense is that it's going to be tough as a foreign student with a relatively low GPA without some truly amazing recommendations.
  18. The curriculum at UVa is radically different from the curriculum at any stat/biostat department I have seen. If it's a new program, I would have a hard time recommending it since I have no idea how employers would view that type of degree.
  19. I don't have much to add other than that the competition is always absolutely brutal among international students. I'd be very hesitant to turn down a bird in the hand, particularly if you have an acceptance at Michigan. I'd hate to see you repeat this game next year and end up with no acceptances at all (or acceptances at schools that you like even less). Do you already have an MS in stat/biostat? If you do then I guess the strategy of applying again after you finish your MS requirements won't work as well.
  20. In response to the discussion elsewhere on this thread, interpret the placement data from various schools very carefully. Not every person who finishes a PhD program wants (or has any interest whatsoever in) a tenure-track job at a research university. Some people simply prefer industry. Others want to find a job near a significant other or friends or family or in a favorite part of the country. (You'd be surprised how many students won't apply to jobs in places where there is snow or in places with no place to buy fresh seafood or strange criteria like that.) I had a student who graduated a couple years ago who turned down multiple tenure track offers to take a non-faculty job near where her husband lives. I had another student who voluntarily took an hourly programmer job despite several publications (one in a top-tier methods journal) because she had just had a baby and wasn't willing to relocate since she relied on her in-laws for child care. And, well, there are also students who come out of good departments who don't get good jobs because they worked with an unknown faculty member and never published anything. It's not the school that is holding them back; it's their own lack of productivity. The only really common denominator is that if you want a job in academia, your best bet is to publish as much as possible in top-tier methods journals and try to get recommendation letters from someone reasonably well-known in the field. Both of these things are generally easier to do at higher-ranked departments. But it's still possible at lower-ranked departments provided you have a good advisor. I can't say it enough times: your advisor's reputation is much more important than the ranking of the school.
  21. For the record, I agree with most of this. I was probably too hard on Hopkins (and I actually didn't know that about Zeger, so my bad), but the point remains that their faculty is much younger (and generally has a much thinner track record) than most of the tenure-track faculty at UNC and Michigan. And I did find it a little weird that their ranking didn't drop at all after losing not only Irizarry but also Giovanni Parmigiani and Francesca Dominici (and I think a couple others) in recent years. My personal opinion is that ranking them so far above UNC/Michigan is not really justified (although this is just my opinion, and I believe these rankings are kind of a silly exercise for the reasons I listed above). When you say a program "outside of the top 10," I assume you mean "outside of the top 10 biostat departments" rather than "outside of the schools ranked in the top 10 by USNWR." I would definitely tell a student to choose Michigan over Harvard if they wanted to do genetics despite their #12 USNWR ranking. But I will say that I wouldn't recommend that a student choose a program other than UW/Harvard/Hopkins/UNC/Michigan in most circumstances if they have an acceptance to at least one of those schools. The circumstances would probably have to imply a combination of a much better funding offer at a lower-ranked school and a strong desire to work with a particular faculty member. Just off the top of my head, someone with a strong interest in Bayesian methods and a generous funding offer from Minnesota may be better going to Minnesota and working with Brad Carlin than taking only one year of guaranteed funding at UNC, for example. So I wasn't suggesting that people ignore the rankings entirely. But keep in mind that the rankings are only useful at the point where higher-ranked schools are more likely to have larger numbers of strong researchers (and more money, which is also important), but at the end of the day, your advisor and your research will matter much more than the ranking of your department. Going to Berkeley and working with Mark van der Laan will almost certainly put you in a better position than going to Harvard and working with someone unknown. And while what you say about having trouble finding an academic job at research university coming from schools outside of the top 10 is probably true, that has more to do with the fact that for the most part these schools have very few (or no) faculty involved with methodological research.
  22. I think you should be competitive just about everywhere if you are applying for the MS. I would be less concerned about your undergraduate institution than I am about the fact that you haven't taken analysis, but that's the only possible concern that I see. (Some places might worry about your GRE score as well, although usually that doesn't play a major role unless you really do poorly.) It will depend on your recommendations, but if they are strong, my guess is that you're more than competitive at the top departments.
  23. As I have said before, these rankings are useful at the point where they give you information about which programs to consider. And they may also be useful for a student who doesn't have a good idea of what they want to research, since the top-ranked departments tend to have strong faculty in many different research areas. That said, I don't think there is a meaningful way to compare the overall quality of two graduate programs, so take these rankings with a big grain of salt. Let's compare (for example) the biostatistics departments at Hopkins, UNC, and Michigan. Hopkins lost a lot of their best faculty over the past few years and their ranking is arguably inflated as a result. (Indeed, I hadn't realize that they also lost Rafael Irizarry to Harvard. Now #5 is looking really generous for them.) However, they still have Scott Zeger, who is a superstar in the field. Most of the rest of their faculty is very young and unproven, though. You compare Hopkins to a place like UNC, that doesn't have anyone on the same level as Scott Zeger, but I would say that their median tenure-track professor is significantly stronger than at Hopkins. And then you could compare both schools to a place like Michigan, which is outstanding for statistical genetics but fairly weak for most everything else. Which of these departments should be ranked the highest? Beats me. And which department is the best for a given student depends heavily on the student's interests. If you definitely want to do statistical genetics, it's a no-brainer; you should go to Michigan. Between Hopkins and UNC, it's less clear. If you definitely wanted to do some research with Scott Zeger (or some of their other top faculty), Hopkins is the obvious choice. On the other hand, if you're not sure what you want to do, UNC may be better, given that they have more strong faculty in more areas than Hopkins does. One way or another, this scenario illustrates the difficulty of ranking departments and why students should not choose departments based on rankings. It's also worth noting that job placement correlates very poorly with the ranking of the department. Sure, most Stanford graduates are going to do well, but after that there is a lot of noise in the data. One's job prospects will typically depend much more on your advisor and your research rather than the ranking of your department. You'd be much better off going to a lower-ranked school and working with a good advisor than you would with a mediocre or bad advisor at a higher-ranked school. Just to give one specific example, although I don't have data on the placement records for every student at top-ranked biostatistics departments, anecdotal evidence suggests that Michigan has placed more students in faculty positions at top-ranked schools than any other department. I think it's because they are the best at statistical genetics, and that is a high-demand area right now. That still doesn't mean that every student should choose Michigan. As I said earlier, it's a poor choice for someone not interested in genetics. But it also means that one shouldn't choose Harvard over Michigan because one thinks that you have a better chance of getting a good job coming out of a higher-ranked school. It's simply not true.
  24. I agree with most of this. However, I will say that point 3 is not true for my department. We typically don't know exactly how much funding is available when we admit students, and while we try our hardest to find funding for all admitted students, quite frequently there isn't enough funding for everyone. The admissions committee will try to make sure that funds are available to their highest-priority students, but for many students whether or not they get funding may depend on whether or not a faculty member with a research grant wants to fund them. And that is more likely to happen if you have already expressed interest in working with that faculty member. So I do think it is worth the time to mention the names of a couple prospective faculty advisers, particularly if you have talked to them before you apply. That said, it probably won't make a difference whether or not you get admitted, and it won't affect funding at many schools, either. And you could potentially hurt yourself if you say something that makes it sound like you don't know what you're talking about. But in general I think it is worth the time to say a few words about the research interests of a couple faculty members in your personal statement.
  25. I'm honestly not sure the math GRE will help you that much. I think Stanford is the only school that still asks for it, and to be perfectly honest with you, very high scores on that test are the norm for international applicants. If you get a nearly perfect score it probably ensures that they will read your application, but it still won't guarantee you admission, and if you do poorly it might doom you. Recommendations are really the most important thing in your case. They need to be very specific. Your recommendation writers need to be able to say that you are the best student in X years and they need to describe what students they are comparing you to. I don't know much about Mexican higher education specifically, but I know in most of Latin America the competition to be admitted to a major university in the first place is already very intense. Your recommenders should say how hard it is to be admitted to your university and then say that you are the best student out of this already select group. They should also describe your specific accomplishments in detail. If you got a high grade in a course that uses a standard textbook that is well-known in the U.S. (Casella and Berger or the Lehmann books, for example), they should also talk about that. In general, you need to convince them that you are one of the best students at your university and that it is worth taking a chance on you rather than a student from Tsinghua or HKU who they already know will have a strong undergraduate preparation.
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