biostat_prof

I want to know where every PhD graduate gets $100k per year in industry. My department is highly ranked and has some strong ties to industry, but a $100k starting salary isn't even close to the market rate in industry around here. Someone with a strong record who gets a job in Big Pharma might get $100k, but many of our PhD graduates in industry start out at lower salaries than our MS graduates. Remember that the market for PhD statisticians is much tighter than the market for MS statisticians, so if you are picky at all about where you want to live, you're probably going to take a big salary hit. I know several recent PhD graduates who have ended up working for $20 per hour without benefits as contractors at local companies. Granted, all of them applied for jobs only in one city, and all of them eventually found better jobs. But saying that anyone with a stat/biostat PhD will earn 6 figures at graduation is grossly unrealistic; no offense. And that also doesn't take into account the fact that many PhD graduates go into academia, where they may only get a $70k starting salary, or even less at teaching-oriented schools (particularly in a staistics department). I agree that the upside for PhD's is higher, but most (virtually all?) PhD graduates won't earn the salaries at the high end of the scale. I saw a study once that said that people with an MS earn about 25% more than those with comparable experience who only had a BS, but the difference between a BS is a PhD was only about 28%. (I can try to find the study if anyone is interested.) Thus, the vast majority of PhD graduates will not earn enough additional salary to justify several years of lost earnings. Hence, my advice to students is always to pursue a PhD only if you love research, because for most people it's a bad decision financially.

If you are dead set on academia, my guess is that your best bet is to do the MA at Michigan. What cyberwulf says is true to a point, but my (highly ranked department) recently admitted a student who had a downright ugly undergraduate record but absolutely killed it in an MS program. I probably can't provide any more details for privacy reasons, but it was a really terrible undergraduate record but they did spectacularly well as an MS student. It was enough to convince the committee to overlook the undergraduate record. So if you enroll in an MA program and do well, it certainly can boost your chances of being admitted to a good PhD program and later finding an academic job. I don't have any hard data about Pitt's placement in academia, but my guess is that it's going to be tough to find a job in a strong department coming out of Pitt. A quick glance at their faculty's web pages indicates that very little (if any) methodological work is being done in that department. I suppose transferring out of Pitt is a possibility, but you would need to do very well (and asking for recommendations could be awkward). That said, think long and hard about whether you really want to be an academic bad enough to pursue this path. Even attending a fully funded PhD program at a top-ranked school is a questionable decision from a strictly financial perspective. Most people will earn more over the course of a career with an MS, to be honest (once you consider the additional 3-4 years of lost earnings to get a PhD). So from a financial perspective, going into debt to get a PhD is almost always a bad decision. Personally I don't recommend it unless you want an academic job so badly that you're willing to live like a student for a very long time (probably even after you finish your PhD) or you are independently wealthy. Also remember that admission to a top-ranked PhD program after earning an MA from Michigan is not guaranteed, nor are you guaranteed to land an academic job after attending a top-ranked PhD program. You will have to decide if you want to make this gamble. Good luck with your decision.

For what it's worth a student that I know was wait listed to their PhD program about two months ago and received an offer off the wait list in the past week or two. I think it's safe to assume that if you haven't heard anything, the best-case scenario is that you are on a "backup wait list" (which is probably not a good place to be, given that Stanford's yield is high). So don't get your hopes up. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Yeah, I don't think that a debate about rankings is productive, either, but for what it's worth, I have a hard time seeing any objective criteria by which one can rank Hopkins in particular above UNC/Michigan given the faculty losses that Hopkins has suffered in the last few years. Anyone who is really interested in the subject can go to these departments' web pages and judge for themselves. Hopkins and UNC both have SciVal Experts profiles for all of their faculty and Michigan has Google Scholar pages for their faculty, so it's easy to pull up the list of publications. Count how many of their tenure-track faculty have recent publications in the top statistical journals (JASA, Annals, Biometrika, JRSS-B and AJHG are probably the best ones; Biostatistics, Biometrics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Bioinformatics, and Genetic Epi are also very good). I didn't take the time to count or average or anything, but just eye balling it I would say both UNC and Michigan doing better than Hopkins on average (and probably not far behind UW or Harvard). And as I have said elsewhere, Michigan seems to be placing more students in the most competitive jobs than any school in the country right now. And I don't know where you get the information that UW/Harvard/Hopkins have the strongest students, because as one who is involved with admissions at one of the schools in question, I'll just say that I have very strong reason to doubt that statement. UNC is fond of pointing out to prospective students that their students win the greatest number of student paper awards at ENAR virtually every single year (ahead of Harvard/Hopkins/Michigan; UW generally doesn't send students to ENAR). Granted, this may be due to the fact that UNC's department is larger (and they may send more students to ENAR as well), but their department is definitely solid and their students seem to produce quality work. Anyway, enough about rankings. I think we all agree that your adviser matters more than the ranking of the school. So research the faculty at the schools you are considering carefully along with things like funding (and what type of work you have to do in exchange for funding), quality of life, etc. As for jobs in industry, I think it probably depends on the department. It's easier if the department has ties to industry and a track record of sending students there. I have known plenty of students who graduated from very good departments who struggled to find jobs in industry and sometimes ended up badly underemployed for a while. Granted, in every case that I know about the person was looking for jobs in a specific geographic location (due to a significant other or whatever). My advice to prospective students would be to try to talk current students/recent graduates and find out how many students take jobs in industry, what types of jobs they take, and how much trouble they had finding them. My impression is that some departments do a better job of placing students in industry and it doesn't correlate well with the usual "prestige" rankings. Sometimes the best departments place a higher percentage of their students in academia so industry doesn't recruit heavily from these departments and faculty don't have experience helping their students find industry jobs. (Indeed, I have heard stories of faculty getting upset and acting like a student is a failure if they want to work in industry.) Also some of the "best" departments tend to be highly theoretical which may not be what industry is looking for. Bottom line: Research the department carefully. And I will readily admit that my data about the "tightening" of the academic job market is anecdotal and based on a very small sample size. That said, I don't think it's just a case of graduates of top-tier schools being too proud to apply to lower-ranked departments. I know of a couple cases in the past years of job candidates with outstanding credentials (multiple papers in JASA/Annals/Biometrika/JRSS- who took jobs at schools that would be considered "second-tier" at best. A few years ago these people probably could have picked any job in the country. Granted, it's a tiny sample size, and maybe these people could have gotten "better" jobs if they wanted them but chose not to. But I still feel like prospective students should know about this.

Repeat after me: "There is no 'top 3.' Your ability to find a good job in academia depends on your publications and your adviser's recommendations, not the name of the school you attended." Sorry that I keep saying that over and over again, but I don't know where this idea that UW/Harvard/Hopkins are somehow orders of magnitude better than any other biostat departments got started on this board, because it's simply false. As I have noted elsewhere, as near as I can tell Michigan is placing more students in the best jobs than any of these three schools right now. Now that I have vented my spleen about that, I'll try to answer the OP's question. The short answer is that it depends heavily on whether you are getting an MS or a PhD and where you attend school. (I know that seems to contradict me previous paragraph. Bear with me for a minute and I'll explain.) Right now I would recommend the MS program in my department to anyone. All of our graduates seem to find jobs without too much trouble and they usually seem to be able to find them in the area they want to live (assuming that it's not rural Nebraska or something like that). And the starting salaries are good; around $65k-$75k seems to be the market rate, with salaries using increasing pretty rapidly for the first few years. I would say that's an excellent investment for most people even if the MS program is unfunded. However, do bear in mind that my department is traditionally one of the top-ranked departments and it also has close ties to industry. I'm not sure things are this rosy everywhere. I would still guess that most stat/biostat MS graduates will be able to find jobs somewhere assuming that there are no huge red flags on their resume. A PhD is another story. My usual advice to students is to ask the following three questions: Do you love research? Do you really love research? Do you love research so much you can't see yourself doing anything else? If you can answer "yes" to all three questions, considering getting a PhD. Otherwise an MS is probably a better choice. The salaries for PhD-level biostatisticians tend to be higher than that for MS-level people (and the upside is certainly higher) but for most people the salary difference between the MS and PhD levels isn't enough to justify the lost earnings resulting from another 2-4 years in school. And the job market is much tighter for PhD's than for MS graduates. (I know that sounds strange, but there are far more job openings for MS statisticians, and they typically don't want to hire PhD graduates because they assume that you'll get bored with the position and leave after a year or two.) Generally speaking, a PhD is a bad choice unless you are willing to live pretty much anywhere in the country. (And that's not always a realistic option if you have a significant other. I know of plenty of PhD graduates from the very top schools who were either badly underemployed or stuck in commuter marriages due to the difficulty of finding a job in the same geographic locale as one's significant other.) To be more specific, at my department, pretty much everyone who wants a job in academia seems to find one, and our placement record in industry is also solid. But my department is ranked fairly highly, and even at my department the vast majority of our graduates find jobs in lower-ranked research universities. These days a paper or two in the top journals (JASA, Annals, Biometrika, JRSS- seems to be almost a requirement to land a job at even mid-tier universities. I would imagine that it's even tougher at lower-ranked schools where frequently there is little or no methodological work being performed. I also don't know what it's like finding a job in industry coming from a lower-ranked school. My guess is that it's doable but they may want to see evidence of experience (usually obtained during summer internships in grad school) and they may also want to see evidence of specific skills on your resume. The main advantage of attending a higher-ranked school for industry jobs is that many larger employers only recruit from certain schools (usually the higher-ranked schools). For academia, the advantage of a higher-ranked school is that typically there are more well-known faculty who are publishing in the best journals. If you attend a lower-ranked school and publish in JASA three times, you're golden, but it will harder to do, because most of the faculty who publish in JASA regularly are at the top-ranked schools. (Indeed, my limited research suggests that in the biostatistics world outside of the top 5-6 departments quite frequently there are only a handful of faculty doing methodological work or sometimes none at all. That will make it very tough to find an academic job at a strong stat/biostat department, since many of them don't care about non-methodological publications unless it's in Science or Nature or something like that.) And yes; it is definitely possible to find jobs in non-biostatistics departments with a biostat degree. In fact it happens all the time. I have a PhD student on the market right now who had several job offers from math departments and statistics departments. And these days it is fairly common for statistical genetics people to find jobs in genetics departments.

At my department (which is traditionally one of the top-ranked biostat departments in the country) every student that I have known who has wanted an academic position has gotten one. That's the good news. The bad news is that with a few exceptions, most of these jobs have been at lower-ranked research universities. And based on limited anecdotal evidence, the competition for jobs at even mid-tier research universities is absolutely brutal these days. At least one paper in JASA/Annals/Biometrika/JRSS-B (or perhaps AJHG for statistical geneticists) seems to be a de facto requirement to land a tenure-track job at most good departments these days, and I have heard of applicants in recent years with multiple publications in these top journals who still ended up taking jobs at mid-tier programs. I would not want to be on the academic job market these days with a thin publication record and a degree from a second-tier PhD program. In any event, assuming that the market doesn't take a drastic turn for the worse in the next couple years, my guess is that most graduates of the top departments will find academic jobs, although they may have to work at lower-ranked schools than they wanted. If you can't get admitted to a top-ranked program, make sure you find a good adviser and get some good methodological publications on your CV before you go on the market. And even at the top-ranked programs, the school's brand name will only carry you so far. Probably 80-90% of academic hiring boils down to publications and recommendations, so even graduates of the best programs would be wise to find a productive adviser and try to get at least 1-2 publications in the top journals if they want to be competitive for the more desirable jobs.

In general an MS will only help your chances of being admitted to a PhD program, particularly if you can take some PhD-level theory courses and do well in them.

I would say that the primary consideration should be the type of research you want to do, since both of these departments are highly specialized. Duke is heavily Bayesian, whereas Harvard focuses heavily on missing data problems and Monte Carlo methods. Harvard probably has slightly more "big name" faculty members, but there are enough heavyweights at Duke that you shouldn't have any trouble finding a good adviser at either school.

Based on my (admittedly limited) experience what you say is definitely true at the PhD level. It does seem like UNC does a better job than Michigan at funding MS students, though. However, as I said, I am basing this on a very small sample size, so take it for what it's worth.

It's hard to know for sure, because a lot depends on recommendations. (And if you are a minority, it is an entirely different game.) That said, I think your GPA is on the low side if you want to be competitive to at any of the "top five" departments. (As I have noted elsewhere, I don't see any justification for placing UNC/Michigan on a lower tier than UW/Harvard/Hopkins, and they are both clearly a step up from Minnesota, for example. But I don't really want to have that debate again on this thread.) The admissions game has become so competitive these days that it seems like most people admitted to those departments have GPA's of 3.8+ (particularly in advanced math courses) along with stellar recommendations and usually some research experience. Granted, really strong recommendations or outstanding research can compensate for lower GPA's, but it doesn't happen often. Well, it does seem like UNC and Michigan will occasionally offer admission without funding to applicants with weaker credentials, but from my point of view an admissions offer without funding is essentially a rejection. (I would strongly advise against attending any PhD program in stat/biostat with a reasonable guarantee of funding for at least 4-5 years.) If you are serious about attending a top-ranked department, your best bet would be to do an MS and try to polish your resume a bit. Otherwise it can't hurt to apply to the top-ranked departments if you have the patience (and money) to do so, but I would definitely have plenty of other schools on the list. If you do attend a lower-ranked program, I would strongly advise you to find out about the availability of funding and the school's placement record, as well as the attrition rate. I know many lower-ranked schools sometimes don't have money to fund all their students for the amount of time it takes to finish a PhD, so students end up either dropping out or taking out loans, both of which you would want to avoid.

If you have taken real analysis, linear algebra, and at least some kind of intro stat course you are more than adequately prepared for MS programs in stat/biostat and you would have a shot at PhD programs as well. It would depend on your grades/recommendations, though. One way or another, the fact that you aren't majoring in math or stat will certainly not doom you.

I'm not extremely familiar with either department these days, but I know Chicago's department is much larger. As I understand it, Harvard's stat department is relatively small and focuses heavily on missing data problems and Monte Carlo methods. Unless you definitely want to do Monte Carlo work I would probably lean toward Chicago if only because you will have more potential research options there. But you should be able to find a job in academia coming out of either school if you pick a good adviser.

I know of at least two MS students who accepted unfunded offers to UNC and were offered funding either during the summer or shortly before classes started in the fall. Based on my (limited) sample size, UNC seems to have a pretty good track record of finding funding for MS students. Specifically, I have worked with a couple MS students who chose UNC over Michigan specifically because UNC offered funding and Michigan did not. Again, I'm working off of a tiny sample size, so take it for what it's worth. I know nothing about Minnesota's track record of funding MS students, although my guess is that they have significantly less money to distribute than either UNC or Michigan. I did work with one student who was admitted to the PhD program at Minnesota a few years back, and their funding offer was significantly less generous than the funding offers from UNC and Michigan (both of which also admitted her).

In my (highly ranked) department our MS students all seem to find jobs with minimal difficulty, and based on limited data the starting salaries typically range between about $60k and $80k. I don't know if this is true at lower-ranked schools. (For the record, I would not classify Michigan as a "lower-ranked" school.) I would try to get as much data as you can from faculty and current students about what types of jobs their MS students obtain after graduation and (if possible) information about starting salaries. My guess is that you will have an easier time getting a higher-paying job out of Michigan. Whether that is worth an additional $80k in debt I have no idea.

Well, no offense, but I have never heard similar statements from anyone that I have ever worked with. See my post above. The fact of the matter is that Hopkins has been weakened by several recent losses of senior faculty members. I suppose you could still make the case that Hopkins is stronger than UNC on the basis that UNC doesn't have any "rock stars" on the same level as Rafael Irizarry or Scott Zeger, but from top to bottom I think UNC's current faculty is a bit stronger. Although this illustrates the silliness inherent in such a comparison. And while Michigan's faculty may not be as strong overall as some of these other schools, I'm not aware of any other departments that has placed as many graduates in top-ranked departments over the past few years. And at the end of the day, isn't that what really matters? I'll repeat my advice: Choose programs based on the reputation of your prospective adviser, not the reputation of the overall department. If you're not wedded to any particular research area, UW/Harvard/Hopkins/UNC all have numerous excellent faculty in a wide variety of research areas. And if you are okay with studying statistical genetics, Michigan should give you as many job opportunities as any of the aforementioned schools. And if you are choosing between any of these schools, I would base the decision on the strength of the faculty in your area of interest or even funding/quality of life issues. When hiring new PhD's the quality of your research and the reputation of your adviser are far more important than where you went to school, so I would strongly advise against choosing a department based on its subjective ranking.

In my department (which is usually ranked highly) we admit MS students without strong math credentials all the time. I know of one case where someone was admitted to the PhD program in one of the very best departments in the country with an undergraduate degree in archeology (or something like that) and had only had one or two math/stat courses. It certainly happens if your credentials are strong (and most MS programs aren't that competitive). If you take the math classes you listed above and combine it with solid references and GRE scores, my guess is that you are admitted to both programs without trouble. Taking advanced calculus would help, but it's doubtful that not taking it would get your application trashed if it is otherwise solid. As an aside, if you are tied to the Bay Area for family reasons, is there some reason you don't consider Berkeley and Stanford? I guess Stanford is further away if you are currently living near Davis or the East Bay, but I don't know where you could be living such that CSU Hayward (or CSU East Bay or whatever they call it nowadays) is closer than Berkeley. With your GPA and a few more math classes you should be competitive for the MS programs at both schools, assuming your recommendations are solid and your GRE scores are acceptable.

I'm not familiar with the probability faculty at either school, so I can't really comment on that. However, I can say that there are definitely more than two professors at UNC who do machine learning. Just off the top of my head, in the stat department there is Steve Marron, Andrew Nobel, and Yufeng Liu, and there are several others in the biostat department (e.g. Michael Kosorok, Donglin Zeng, and several junior faculty). I do tend to agree that there are more faculty working on machine learning at Michigan and that Michigan is probably a bit stronger overall in this area, but UNC is strong in machine learning as well.

He has a joint appointment in biostatistics, as do many of the statistics faculty at UNC.

I hate debates over rankings given how meaningless these rankings are in the first place... Having said that, saying that Harvard/Hopkins/UW are a clear step above UNC/Michigan is an extremely questionable claim. If anything, I would rank UNC above Hopkins at this point given some of their recent faculty losses (Francesca Dominici and Giovanni Parmigiani jump to mind immediately, and I think there are a couple others). Indeed, the ranks of senior faculty at Hopkins strike me as a bit thin these days. It's still a great place because of all the collaborations with the #1 medical school in the world, but I think they probably have less world-class senior biostatistics faculty than UW/Harvard/UNC right now. (Although this is just my opinion, and I think others might disagree.) I'm not aware of any comparable faculty losses at UNC. Indeed, if anything UNC has strengthened their department considerably with recent hires at both the senior (Michael Kosorok, Jason Fine) and junior (Yun Li, Yufeng Liu) levels. If none of these people qualify as "hotshots" in your book, I would be interested to know who you consider to be a hotshot. And my recollection is that UNC has also had something like 6 new IMS/ASA fellows over the past 2-3 years. So I can't see any reasonable metric by which one would rank UNC below Hopkins at this point. Overall I would still probably put them very slightly below UW/Harvard, but that's mainly my subjective opinion. There is very little meaningful difference between these schools. As for Michigan, it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison given that they are easily the top department in the country for statistical genetics (which is a red-hot area right now) but considerably weaker in most other areas. Does excellence in one area compensate for weaknesses in other areas? Who knows? That's why this idea of ranking departments is so silly in the first place. In any event, given the fact that statistical genetics is so hot right now, Michigan's placement record for its recent PhD graduates compares favorably with any school in the country. Off the top of my head, in the past few years they have placed Ali Shojaie at Washington, Liming Liang at Harvard, and Yun Li at UNC, and I am sure there are others. Indeed, I'm not aware of any other school in the country that has placed as many of their recent graduates in tenure-track positions at top-tier universities as Michigan has. Any student who definitely wants to study statistical genetics would probably be wise to choose Michigan over any other school in the country (other than maybe Stanford). And if a student doesn't have strong feelings about their dissertation topic but simply wants to maximize their employment prospects, Michigan is a very solid option as the top school in a very high-demand research area. Also, the claim that UNC/Michigan don't win student recruiting battles against UW/Harvard/Hopkins is simply false. I can say this as someone who has been involved in admissions and student recruitment at one of these schools. I can't share this data publicly, obviously, and it's too small of a sample size to draw any firm conclusions. But I can definitely tell you that UNC and Michigan hold their own against UW/Harvard/Hopkins in terms of student recruitment. In any event, I tell my students that if they aren't married to any particular research area, they can't go too far wrong with any of UW/Harvard/Hopkins/UNC, since they all have strong faculty in a wide variety of research areas. Michigan is also worth a look assuming that the student doesn't totally hate the idea of studying statistical genetics. After that, my advice is to find a department that has at leats 1-2 strong faculty members in a research area that one is interested in, because the reputation of the adviser is more important than the reputation of the department at that point. But I would definitely take issue with advising someone to definitely choose UW/Harvard/Hopkins over UNC or Michigan, because I simply don't see good evidence to support that advice.

It happens, but it's not common. Your best bet would be to finish an MS at your first school and then try to apply to other programs. Keep in mind that you almost certainly will be in school for more time if you do this, since it typically takes two years to get an MS but having an MS will usually shave at best one year off of a PhD program. And asking for recommendation letters is likely to be very awkward if you try to do this. (Although it would be a different story if you are not being funded by your first PhD program. I can't imagine any professor would hold it against you if you tried to transfer to a school with a funding. But if they spent money funding you for a couple years and then you wanted to transfer, that could ruffle feathers.) Also, if you are not competitive for a higher-ranked program now, you would have to do extremely well in an MS program to change that. As an aside, I have said many times that prospective PhD students worry way too much about rankings, given that the reputation of your adviser matters far more than the reputation of your school. That said, I'm scratching my head that anyone would say that the "consensus" top-three biostat programs are UW, Harvard, and Hopkins. No offense, but don't base these evaluations on the USNWR rankings. The consensus of everyone that I talk to is that you have to add UNC to that list and maybe Michigan as well... But as I said, worry more about the reputation of your adviser than the reputation of your school. The only real advantage to attending a higher-ranked school is that they have more strong faculty members in more research areas and they are also likely to have more funding. If you are not admitted to a "top tier" department, I would recommend that you choose a department that has a strong faculty member or two in an area that you are interested rather than trying to transfer.

UNC has already had their visit weekend for admitted PhD students; I can tell you that much. If you applied for the PhD program and you haven't heard yet, it's probably not looking good at this point. I have no idea what the status is for MS admissions.

Their faculty is very strong although very small. If your research interests align with their research interests, it's a great option. But the faculty research interests at Harvard aren't as diverse as they are at a larger department like Stanford or Berkeley. I'm not super-familiar with the type of research that goes on in Harvard's stat department, but I have been told that a very large percentage of their research involves missing data or Monte Carlo methods, and a quick glance at their web site seems to confirm that. So if you are interested in either of these areas, it's a fantastic option, but it might not be a good option if you are dead set on working in a different area. It's also a bit risky if you don't know what you want to research (which is common for incoming grad students) in that your options will be much more limited than they will be at other departments. I hope that helps.

If you are applying for a PhD program (and particularly if you are interested in academia), the reputation of your dissertation adviser is far more important than the reputation of the program where you did your PhD. Thus, I always tell students not to obsess over rankings, because you would be much better off attending a lower-ranked school and working with a star adviser than attending a higher-ranked school and working with a mediocre adviser. And you also have to consider whether or not a department is strong in the areas in which you are interested. To give a couple specific examples, Michigan's biostat program is a fantastic option if you are interested in genetics, but it's not such a great option for most other areas. Likewise Harvard's stat department is small, but it's definitely the best in the world for missing data and a couple other areas. But it would be a mistake to attend Harvard's stat department unless you are interested in one of the research areas where they are strong. That said, it can be advantageous to attend a higher-ranked department, particularly if you're not sure about your research interests when you start grad school (which in my experience is true of a high percentage of students). Typically the higher-ranked departments tend to have strong faculty in a wide variety of research areas. They also tend to be better-funded, so there is less of a concern about having your funding run out after a couple years. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to choose a PhD program purely based on rankings given that there isn't a huge difference between many of the top programs. My advice would be to carefully examine the research interests of the faculty at each school. It's also worth considering funding, quality of life, and things like that. Rankings would be very low on the list of things that I would consider. Having said all that, if you want my feedback on the rankings that people have proposed earlier, I would put UNC in the top tier for biostatistics. Maybe Michigan as well, although they are hard to rank due to being so heavily focused on genetics. But most people say that UW/Harvard/Hopkins/UNC represent the top tier of biostatistics and sometimes Michigan depending on who you talk to. All of the four aforementioned schools have large departments with diverse faculty research interests so practically any student should be able to find a good adviser at any of those schools. After that, I would say that the research interests of the faculty and availability of funding should be more important than rankings, because many of the remaining departments are strong in a couple areas but very weak in other areas. As for statistics, I'm less familiar with the gossip about the quality of the various statistics programs. That said, even among the top-ranked schools, one should consider the research interests of the faculty and how they align with your interests. Some departments have the reputation of being more theoretial (e.g. Berkeley, Chicago) whereas others are more applied (e.g. Stanford, CMU), for instance. But I'm basing this largely on gossip that I heard years ago, so take it for what it's worth. I recommend that you carefully research the faculty research interests of each department you are considering.

To answer your earlier question, it is much easier both to be admitted and to get funding if you are a U.S. citizen. If you want to do applied work, I would definitely add CMU. Chicago is debatable given that their department tends to be more theoretical. And Stanford is also worth applying to if you are willing to go to the hassle of taking the math GRE. You should also take a look at a few of the top-ranked biostat programs, namely UW, Harvard, UNC, Hopkins, and Michigan. (Since you asked about UNC specifically, I would definitely apply to biostat if you go there, since most of their strongest faculty are in biostat, and most of their best stat faculty are joint appointed in biostat anyway.) As for your specific choice of schools, I would be leery of applying to the stat department at Harvard unless you definitely want to work on missing data or something like that. Their faculty are all excellent, but it's a very small department, and many of them work in the same few areas, so your pool of potential advisors/research topics will be smaller. And I don't see much reason to apply to Columbia unless there is a faculty member there that you want to work with. You should get into a higher-ranked program than that. Let me know if you have any other questions. I don't read this forum regularly, but I try to come on here every so often during application season.

I'm a professor at a top-ranked biostat department, and your strategy sounds perfect to me. Most MS programs are not very competitive, so your GPA shouldn't be a major barrier. (Indeed, if your grades in your upper-division math courses are solid, you may be able to apply directly to a PhD program, but you will probably have more options if you do well in an MS program first.) Be sure to try to get some research experience and cultivate relationships with well-known professors who can write you recommendations, because that will help a lot. If it makes you feel any better, I know of recent cases where my department admitted students with catastrophic undergraduate GPA's provided that they showed evidence of better grades by their senior year and performed well in an MS program. Good luck.