cyberwulf

And, FWIW, here's the AmStat News survey results for statisticians in government, industry and business (salaries are in $1,000s):

Just to be clear, I never said that 6 figures was a stone cold lock for any biostat PhD graduate, only that it seems like roughly the average for our graduates entering private industry (mostly big pharma or other medical research companies). I'm surprised to hear that in your area MS students are earning more than PhDs, because that doesn't appear to be the case in our neck of the woods. Do you think it's a function of your being in a region which is flush with PhD statisticians? Why would companies pay more for Masters statisticians if PhD statisticians were available? Salaries for new assistant profs in academic biostat departments are much higher than $70k; indeed, the latest figures from the AmStat News biostatistics salary survey (see below) shows that the median starting salary for a newly hired faculty member is... $102,000. Presumably these numbers are being driven upwards by salary pressure from private industry.

I'm going to disagree with you here. In my geographical area, starting salaries for M.S. students in private industry average around $70k, while PhDs start near $100k. Even if you figure four years of lost earnings = $280,000 (which is an overestimate for a funded PhD student earning a stipend of $20-$25,000 per year), a PhD makes up that difference within 10 years, and probably less given that the salary gap is likely to increase over time.

The best thing you can do is to ace as many math courses as you can. You might also think about looking into what's covered on the Math Subject GRE, and take courses that will prepare you for it.

UF is decent for biostats right now, and I think they will improve their standing going forward. They seem to be well-connected to the stats department, which is good because there are several strong faculty there.

This is a common question without an easy answer. While some fraction of students do 'upgrade' to a stronger PhD program after completing an MS, the reality is that admissions committees consider the entirety of a student's academic record when making PhD admission decisions, and so good performance in an MS program doesn't negate mediocre undergraduate performance. The following student types are most likely to benefit from completing a Masters degree from a highly-ranked department before applying to PhD programs: Type I: Students with very strong records (e.g., GPA 3.8-3.9+) from relatively unknown undergraduate institutions Type II: Students with excellent academic credentials, but severely lacking in mathematical preparation Those least likely to benefit are: Type III: Students with solid but unspectacular records with adequate mathematical preparation from good schools. As a general rule, adcoms at top-tier departments are seeking talent and intelligence more than a particular set of statistical skills. With Type I students, the talent/intelligence level may be unclear because of uncertainty about the level of competition and rigor they faced as undergraduate students. Strong performance in an elite Masters program can go a long way towards showing that the excellent performance wasn't just a mirage. With Type II students, the Masters may be useful to confirm that their talents extend beyond a single field to encompass mathematics/statistics as well. With Type III students, good performance in a Masters program is basically expected, and adds relatively little information about that student's abilities. Of course, every individual's situation is different, but I think that students too often fall into the trap of thinking that stellar performance in a Masters program will cause everyone to ignore the rest of their academic record, while that is rarely if ever the case.

Both UW and Harvard are better programs than Berkeley; the gap isn't enormous, but it's there; not sure how much of an impact it will make if you're looking for a job in industry. What you really need to find from UW and Harvard is what percentage of the students they don't guarantee funding to are able to secure an RA/TA position in their first year. Both UW and Harvard are big departments with tons of collaborative research going on, so there are generally a lot of positions to go around. No guaranteed funding can mean anything from "yeah, you're going to be paying $60k during the first year", to "yeah, we can't GUARANTEE that money will be available, but short of an epic disaster you shouldn't have a problem securing funding." You should try to find out where on that continuum unfunded Masters students typically fall.

I agree with much of what biostat_prof laid out above. A few points of difference (and some of agreement): - At the risk prolonging a fruitless debate, I don't think one can argue that there is at least a general perception among students and many faculty that UW/Hopkins/Harvard are a notch above other departments. Obviously, there are some metrics which would disagree with this ranking and others which would agree, but one result of this "perception gap" is that these three schools attract the strongest applicant pools and have the strongest (on average) incoming classes. The fact that the strongest students are most likely to end up in top academic positions serves to reinforce the perception gap, though these students might have been equally successful at other schools. The obvious corollary to this is that a strong student need not attend a "top 3" school to be successful. - biostat_prof is exactly right that the productivity and reputation of your adviser matters much more than the name on the front gates of campus; the advantage of a higher-ranked school, then, is that increases the chances that you will find a productive, well-known adviser to work with. Things rarely go exactly as planned in graduate school, so being at a top place provides some comfort in knowing that if you "fall into" (or get assigned to) a project with almost any faculty member, turning that project into a dissertation will set you up well to achieve your goals, whether they be a job in industry or a tenure-track faculty position. As you go down the rankings, a student has to be more mindful of seeking out an appropriate adviser to match what they want to achieve. - The industry job market seems pretty strong to me for both MS and PhD grads, and might even be stronger for the latter than the former. PhD graduates from our department looking to work in industry typically have jobs lined up before they graduate or shortly after; many looking down this path do summer internships at their eventual employers. - Academic positions are a different story. A strong publication record (1-2 first authored in good journals minimum) has become a de facto lower bound for hiring at methods-oriented departments (roughly the top 10-12), and more students are taking post-doctoral positions to boost their CV even beyond this. I have to admit I'm not as familiar with hiring at lower-level departments, but I think that most good graduates of the top handful of departments would be able to find a position at a lower-ranked place. Some of the perceived 'tightening' of the academic job market may be a result of graduates of these top departments having unrealistic expectations about where they might be hired, and hence being 'too proud' to apply to places down the ladder, or to research-track appointments.

I think the academic job market in biostats is still relatively reasonable, and a post-doc is not required to land a faculty position at many top 10 departments. I would say that, in any given year, about half the top-10 departments advertise for tenure-track positions, and roughly half of those go to students straight out of their PhD. There are also many 'research-track' and affiliate positions available. Further, it's essentially unheard-of for students in biostat to do more than one post-doc, so at most you're looking at two (maybe three) additional years where you can get a jump start on your publication record before you begin your career as a professor.

Pitt is certainly not on the level of most of the other programs you list, but they seem to be gaining some strength and have had success placing students recently. Whether or not it's a good idea to wait a year depends on your current academic record and other factors: Are your grades stellar, but you simply lack key math prerequisites like linear algebra, or are they more "solid"? How strong is your undergrad school and your Masters program? Are you domestic or international? Do you think your letters will be strong? How are your test scores? etc. I think I would lean towards taking the offer from Pitt unless you're quite confident that you are likely to be admitted to places like Berkeley/UNC/Emory/Columbia next year after having taken the additional math courses. It sounds like Columbia's been happy to communicate with you; you might want to see if someone there can give you an honest assessment of how far off you were from being admitted, and whether taking more math would dramatically improve your chances.

I couldn't disagree more completely with you. Applicants are PAYING MONEY to have their application managed. This means more than just an evaluation by the admissions committee; it should also include communicating to students the status of their application on request. Of course, some anxious students probably email excessively, but this is apparently not the case for the OP or apparently many people on this board. This attitude of "professors are too busy to deal with graduate students (or prospective students)" really bugs me. If a faculty member is too busy to deal with the responsibilities of admissions, they shouldn't agree to be involved. If all faculty members/administrators are too busy or unwilling to put in the effort, then maybe the department shouldn't be running a graduate program in the first place or at the very least should find some people willing to manage it better.

I think most of the advice here is pretty good. You probably have a better shot at UW than Harvard/Hopkins due to # of students they admit.

Just tell them the truth. If anything, knowing that you are fairly likely to accept a PhD offer from them (assuming you would take a funded PhD over a presumably unfunded Masters at those other places) will probably make them more interested in admitting you.

Yep, if nothing's been mentioned, it's usually because they can't promise you any money. But programs do differ in terms of how likely you are to be able to secure RA/TA positions when you show up in the fall, so I suggest you try to look into that.

Take advanced LA over ODE. The former is much more useful to stats/biostats than the latter.

ML is a very, very broad area at this point, spanning fairly abstract statistical theory to quite applied computational methods. With a basic knowledge of programming, I think a smart person could pick up the requisite skills.

I would favor Washington, for the following reasons: - Between stat and biostat (which are closely linked there), there are plenty of faculty working on machine learning, likely more than Yale. - You'll have more options; a department with only 10 faculty is awfully small for someone like you who doesn't have any set research interests. - Students at Washington get enough theoretical training that the better ones can compete for jobs at good stat departments, at least in the U.S. Don't know how graduates fare in Asia. - I just don't buy the "Yale name" argument, particularly if you will be looking for an academic position in Asia. Many faculty at non-U.S. institutions were trained in the U.S., and know quite well that UW is more highly-regarded than Yale in stat/biostat. There's a reason that UW attracts so many top applicants from China and Korea; their advisors all recommend that they go there!

I'm going to quibble with you a bit here, since I'm of the belief that Harvard/Hopkins/UW are deserving of their "top-3" moniker (though it of course goes without saying that UNC and Michigan are also excellent departments). You can dismiss the US News rankings, but prestige matters, and there's not much doubt that these three schools draw the strongest incoming classes; UNC, Michigan, Minnesota, Emory, etc. just don't win student recruiting battles against these schools with any regularity. Furthermore, I don't think you'll find a lot of people who would say that, on average, the faculty at UNC/Michigan are as strong as the top 3. Of course, this isn't to say that the top 5-8 faculty at some lower-ranked places aren't on par with faculty at H/H/W, or that there aren't some specialty areas where lower-ranked schools are stronger than the top 3. But, just as with students, hotshot new faculty are consistently accepting offers at UW, Harvard, and Hopkins and not at UNC/Michigan, which indicates to me that a gap exists and is likely to be maintained for awhile.

Transfers between PhD programs in the same discipline are rare in the first place, and even rarer when a student is only moving up a rung or two on the prestige ladder. The main reason is that students who are excelling at a good program are generally very well-regarded and have little incentive to leave. Indeed, adcoms are often suspicious of PhD transfers: Was there a personality conflict? Were the faculty just not excited by this person's potential? Was language ability a concern? Add to that the fact that faculty at the school you are leaving have "invested" in you and will not be keen to write you strong letters of recommendation so that you can go somewhere else, and it's very hard to build a strong enough application to crack a top-tier place.

Yeah, it should probably be in there. Once you get to Tier 3 and below, it's kind of hard to be precise.

In these days of air travel, virtually no major research university is 'isolated', particularly not one which is in a big city like Minneapolis. Climate doesn't deter academic collaboration; sure, conferences are typically held in more temperate locations during the winter months, but if an esteemed researcher at, say, Wisconsin invites you to deliver a seminar in January (or, conversely, someone at Texas-Austin invites you in mid-July), nobody is going to refuse because of the weather.

Yes, international students apart from Canadians don't typically attend the recruiting/interview day. It would appear that there are probably 5-10 international admits in any given year, spread out from January to April.

My understanding is that they typically bring in about 20-25 students for the visit day, accept most of them, and make up any shortfall at the end with a handful of late admits.

In fields like stat and biostat, there is really no difference (all other things being equal) between going to a school that waitlisted you vs. one that accepted you initially. Only faculty members on the admissions committee know how candidates ranked relative to each other, and even they will likely forget after a few months, so you should have equal access to good advisors when the time comes to start dissertation work.

I'd say that UBC and UT are probably in Tier III (for stat); there are no Canadian biostat departments in Tiers I-III.