cyberwulf

If your school is anywhere NEAR the top 40, with a record like this you're a slam dunk admit to basically any Masters program in the country (yes, this includes Harvard). I think you're crazy to even be considering SUNY Buffalo; it's not even in the yard of Harvard/Michigan/UCLA, and certainly below Pitt in terms of prestige. If I were you, I'd start with the top 10 biostat programs, narrow your list down to places you would consider living for a couple of years, and apply to those. Most Masters programs don't usually guarantee funding (Michigan being a notable exception), but since your profile is so strong you might be able to get a couple of enticing offers from places who see the potential to "convert" you into a PhD student down the road.

You certainly have plenty of mathematical preparation. In addition to letters and test scores, I think your success will depend on the (perceived) strength of your undergraduate institution; your profile could be viewed very differently depending on the level of academic competition you're facing. To give some examples, top-line numbers like yours from a highly-regarded state university probably put you in the discussion at most biostat PhD programs you listed and stat programs outside the top 5. With this same profile from a little-known local commuter school, it will be a challenge to crack most of the PhD programs you listed.

Are you talking about the Mathematics (subject) GRE or the general GRE? Many programs don't require the former but I don't know of a lot of institutions where you don't need the latter. The general GRE requirement typically comes from the graduate school and hence can't be waived by the department.

Diversity statements are typically used to establish whether you are a member of an under-represented group (e.g. racial/ethnic minority, disabled, low-income, etc.) and hence eligible for fellowships/scholarships available specifically to those groups. As mentioned by a couple of other posters, the bulk of this funding is available only to U.S. citizens/permanent residents. If "being an international student" is your primary claim to increasing diversity, then by all means write the statement but I wouldn't spend time agonizing over it since it is unlikely to have much of an impact on your application.

Most of the material you learn in biostat is relevant to applied statistics in general. At institutions which are home to separate stat and biostat departments, the stat department tends to skew more theoretical while biostat skews more applied. If you're set on a stat program, I would focus on big programs at places without a separate biostat department: NC State, Purdue, Iowa State, Penn State, and Texas A&M come to mind. At places like Michigan, UNC, etc. (which have both stat and biostat), I would look closely at biostat to see if it aligns better with your interests. One exception to this rule is Washington, where the stat department is quite strong in applications (particularly sociology) despite the presence of an excellent biostat department.

You're pretty light on math to be competitive for top 20 stat places. I suppose if you went a really good undergrad school you might get a look. If you're primarily interested in applications and collaborative research, I don't see why you're ruling out biostat departments. Most of the top 10-15 biostat departments provide rigorous theoretical training; often the core courses are shared with the stat department, and there is the opportunity to take more advanced theory if you want it. Your profile will play a lot better in the biostat arena; you would likely be competitive for top 10 departments and depending on your letters etc., possibly for top 5 places as well.

I'm going to assume here that you did not attend one of the top handful of Chinese universities (PKU, Fudan, Tsinghua, etc.) If you did, your chances might be a little (but not a lot) better than this: With your fairly low undergraduate GPA and low TOEFL (many departments get nervous with scores below 100), you will not be competitive for admission at places ranked in the top 15. You may be able to get an offer from a lower-ranked program (20-30), but even then there are a lot of international students with much better academic records than yours who will also not be admitted to top 15 places. To give you a rough idea, a typical top 10 program sees 150-250 PhD applicants. About 50-60% of these are international students, and they are all competing for ~5-10 offers. The remaining ones -- many of whom are good students -- have to go somewhere, and often make up a very high fraction of enrollees at at lower-ranked departments.

Echo the retake sentiment. Unless your definition of 'large respected state school' is wildly different than mine, it seems impossible that someone who got A's in Real Analysis and Abstract Algebra (and scored 166V!) would consistently score below 165Q.

Answered in cross-posted thread.

You're going to have trouble being admitted to a top 15 PhD program in biostatistics, not so much because of your lack of mathematical preparation (which seems a little thin, but assuming you have multivariable calculus is OK) but because your academic performance thus far hasn't been outstanding. As I often mention in the math/stat/biostat forum, the bar is extremely high for international students to be admitted to biostat programs; most students who get in are math or stat majors from one a handful of elite Chinese institutions (PKU, Fudan, Tsinghua, etc.). Obviously, your chances will be better if you attended one of these places (even without a quantitative major) or have absolutely stellar letters of recommendation. A better path for you -- if you can find funding or afford tuition -- might be to apply to Masters programs in biostatistics and then go the PhD route from there.

The assumption is that the first author is the one primarily responsible for the content of the paper, and having a published first-author paper, even in a second- or third-tier journal, would put you in relatively rare company among applicants. Being second or third author (order after first doesn't really matter) on a paper in a top-tier journal would be a positive, but I don't think it would carry as much weight as a first authorship.

You're misinterpreting what I'm saying. A shoddy SoP will obviously make you look bad; it still needs to be professional, and furthermore you never know which faculty are going to put more weight on the SoP. I'm just advocating against spending excessive amounts of time agonizing over exactly how to phrase things, which professors to name-drop, etc.

You do have to be a bit careful about being overly specific, for two reasons: 1) You may not have a good grasp on what exactly you're proposing, and come off as a bit clueless or naive; 2) If nobody on the faculty is interested in the project you want to work on, there might be some concern about lack of "fit". EDIT: What you've suggested actually does sound relatively reasonable, but the set of faculty working at the intersection of causal inference and ML is pretty small, and the subset familiar with the econometrics literature is even smaller.

Definitely not meant as a personal attack on you, I just get frustrated seeing the same thing being parroted all over the place. Frankly, I'm a bit skeptical that stat/biostat are huge outliers on the importance of the personal statement; the PS may be more important in other fields, but I suspect its impact is exaggerated across the board.

This is (with apologies for my tone) simply nonsense. Most folks entering stat/biostat PhD programs apply just after starting their senior year of college; many have had little or no exposure to statistical research. The vast majority of faculty making admissions decisions understand that expecting these students to identify a "gap in the literature" when they clearly don't yet have the skills to even understand the literature is ridiculous.

For who? I'd say it's an obvious 'yes' for a current grad student in stat or biostat. For aspiring grad students, I don't see as much value.

It depends on what your goals are. You should have no problem getting into a quality Masters program in biostat (Michigan, Minnesota, UNC, etc.) with a ~3.5 from Northwestern. Cracking a top 10 PhD program will be tough, but you might find some success at some of the larger programs outside that range, e.g., Texas, Iowa, Pittsburgh, etc.

A few thoughts: 1. Most epidemiologists spend their time designing, carrying out, and analyzing data from obervational studies and randomized trials. A much smaller group does "epi methods" -- essentially developing new strategies for designing and analyzing studies -- but a good fraction of these folks weren't trained as epidemiologists but rather as (bio)statisticians/mathematicians. 2. Unlike math/stat/biostat, epidemiology PhD programs typically want students entering the program to have completed a Masters degree (typically an MPH) first. The reason is that Epi PhD students are expected to have a "shovel-ready" idea for a dissertation when they step on campus, and undergraduate students typically haven't had enough "real-world" experience to develop a specific research question that they want to investigate. 3. In comparison to PhD programs in math/stat/biostat, Epi PhD students typically have much more limited quantitative background. I doubt that there are more than a handful a Epi PhD programs where the average quantitative GRE score is above the 80th percentile. 4. Unless you know the precise sub-field of epidemiology you plan on pursuing (e.g., infectious disease epidemiology, where a couple of molecular biology courses might be helpful), it's hard to justify taking a lot of bio/chem classes. I get the impression that most epidemiologists become interested in a particular area during their Masters/work experience and then pick up the biomedical background they need along the way. 5. It would appear that Northwestern has a one-year Masters program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics (http://www.publichealth.northwestern.edu/prospective-students/mseb.html). Wouldn't that be more relevant than Applied Math?

If you're going the European route, you're almost certainly looking at starting in a Masters program, for which I think you'll be a very strong candidate.

If programs are unranked, it usually means there just aren't enough data to make a reasonable comparison. So, it's going to be tough to rank them.

Are you looking to apply to stat or biostat? Regardless, you will need to have reasonable expectations, as "good" places (top 10-15 biostat, top 20-30 stat) are probably out of reach for you with your current record. To have any chance at these places, I think you would have to make it into a decent Masters program (which may be possible) and perform excellently there.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but you are facing a really tough road to get admitted to a decent biostat PhD program. The median GPA of students entering top 10 programs is >3.8, and this number is even higher for students entering with a Masters degree (though I don't know your field, in stat/biostat a Masters GPA <3.7 is considered below average). When you add this to the fact that you're lacking in mathematical background, you're going to have a difficult time competing. Your best bet, I think, would be to try to get into a Masters program somewhere decent, and use good performance there (i.e., 3.8+ GPA, strong letters, etc.) as the basis of your PhD application.

Also consider: Berkeley Biostat and NC State stat.

Biostat MS programs don't require you to take Real Analysis, either as a pre-requisite or during the program. But you ABSOLUTELY should take calc-based probability and statistics before starting the MS.

Well, there's no doubt that getting an "A" in a harder course will do more for you; but I think the concern is that's much less likely in a class you are under-prepared for.