cyberwulf

If they have indicated that a funded offer may be forthcoming, then giving you a short leash seems like it violates the spirit if not the letter of the CGS resolution.

The degree of 'rollingness' depends on the institution. Some make all the decisions in 1-2 meetings in a two-week window, others may spread the process out over 3-5 meetings in three months.

Seems like their incoming classes average in the 10-15 range.

That's the basic idea, though it would be uncommon for such a high proportion on our waitlist to accept offers elsewhere before hearing a final decision from us.

I think this is a crummy thing to do, but if they're not offering you financial support then technically they're not violating the April 15 Council of Graduate Schools agreement. Just write to them explaining the situation and see what they say; I have trouble believing they'd kick you to the curb for wanting to wait a couple of weeks.

I would say that the typical international cohort at Harvard is a slightly stronger version of what you see at UW and Hopkins. It seems that Harvard gets a wider diversity of international students than those places, i.e. not just folks from China/Korea and India.

Most places which don't fund (or fund very few) Masters students will review applications even if they come in after the deadline. You should email the places you're interested in and find out if they are still reviewing Masters applications; I would bet you that quite a few are despite their early deadlines.

"Research fellowship" sounds a lot like an RA position to me. Though I can't imagine it could be for that many hours if it's only $2K.

Yes, the program is solid, I'd say top 15.

Yes; if they're paying you for 12 months, they will typically expect 12 months of work as an RA/TA.

At my institution, the waitlist is of length slightly less than N/2, where N is the total number of first-round offers. We generally end up admitting about 20-30% of waitlisted students to the program, though the denominator is a bit fuzzy since some waitlisted students will take offers elsewhere before we have the chance to make them an admissions offer.

Earlier than April? Not necessarily; some people on the waitlist also get rejected late in the game.

Typically, applicants are roughly sorted into three piles: 'definite admit', 'maybe', and 'definite reject'. The relative size of the three piles depends on the institution, but it sounds like you're in the second group. From the 'maybe' pile, there are several possible outcomes: admitted soon, rejected soon, waitlisted and admitted later, waitlisted and rejected later. The waitlist could be official, in which case you should hear something soon, or unofficial, in which case you may be in the dark until April. Not hearing anything past the beginning of March almost certainly means you're on an unofficial waitlist of some sort.

Stats and biostats departments should really be ranked separately. For stat, my rankings would be: TIER I Stanford; UC - Berkeley; Harvard; Chicago; TIER II UW - Seattle; CMU; Duke; UW - Madison; UM - Ann Arbor; NC State; TIER III Wharton; Cornell; Columbia; Minnesota; UCLA; UNC; Yale; For biostat, I would say: TIER I Harvard; Johns Hopkins; UW-Seattle; TIER II Minnesota; Michigan; UNC; TIER III UC-Berkeley; Penn; Emory; Columbia; UCLA; Brown; UW-Madison;

That looks more or less right.

There is at least one recent UCLA biostat grad who is doing a post-doc at Harvard, so grads from there can be successful in academia. I think of Davis more as a stat department; don't really know much about their biostat program.

If you are choosing between a fast-track MS offer and a straight-up PhD offer (presumably at a somewhat lower-ranked place), be sure you get as much information as you can about how the fast-track works. Specifically, you should find out: - Is funding guaranteed during the Masters? If not, do fast-track MS students receive funding priority over other MS students? - What percentage of the incoming Masters class is on the PhD fast-track? - Is there a separate application for PhD admission, or is it automatic for fast-track students? - What proportion of fast-track Masters students continue on into the PhD program? What proportion leave with a Masters? What proportion pursue a PhD elsewhere?

If a department's not ranked, it's safe to assume it's pretty mediocre.

Here's my stat/biostat-centric view; ; I'll restrict discussion to elite (top 5-10) departments because it's obvious that the raised bar at lower-ranked places is due to a surplus of good international students not gaining admission at higher-ranked institutions. I think there are four primary reasons why the bar for international students is higher: There is more funding available for domestic than international students. This is particularly true in biostatistics, where a large proportion of domestic students are funded by NIH training grants. Indeed, in order to get their training grants renewed, departments must demonstrate that they have an adequate number of 'training-grant eligible' (read: US citizen or permanent resident) applicants and enrollees to. Language ability is often a concern. At top places, many students who apply are capable of handling the required coursework and exams. So, the question then becomes who has the most 'research upside', or (for more risk-averse places) who is least likely to be an 'anchor' once they pass qualifying exams. English-speaking domestic students are generally competent writers/communicators, and so this gives them a decided edge over internationals who may struggle writing a dissertation. The TOEFL provides some guidance to language/writing ability, but it only tells you so much. Faculty have less 'feel' for the relative strength of international universities than U.S.-based ones. Whereas most professors have a good sense of -- or can look up -- how the student bodies at (say) Princeton, Michigan, and, Oklahoma State compare, comparing foreign universities is much more difficult. As a result, top departments often accept international students from just a handful of known elite foreign institutions (PKU/Tsinghua in China, ISI in India, etc.) Evaluating the performance of foreign students attending U.S. universities can be challenging. From talking to colleagues, it is my impression that, particularly at good Asian universities, the vast majority students are working extremely hard and putting in long hours. Even at elite U.S. universities, most students are not exerting this amount of effort, and so a relatively talented international student with an awesome work ethic can get great grades stateside. Of course, some of these high-performing international students are brilliant, but it can be hard for adcoms to distinguish inherent smarts from excellent discipline/dedication based on the U.S. academic record.

In previous years, Harvard invited a batch of applicants to their recruiting event (which has already happened this year), and then made some very late offers (to people who were not invited) in the first two weeks of April. So, not getting an invite to the recruiting event doesn't necessarily mean you've been rejected; you could just be on the waitlist.

If the event includes prospective applicants (i.e. people who haven't even applied yet) and they aren't reimbursing you for travel, then this sounds no different than every other university's "open house" (more typically held in the fall, when people are deciding where to apply) where they tell you about the program(s) in generic terms.

Meh, I think (nice) jeans are fine if paired with a decent collared shirt. Probably wouldn't rock a hoodie, though.

I rank NC State as a top 10 department. It's strong in several areas, including spatial statistics.

The only thing subtracting the mean of each section does is shift everyone's scores by a constant factor, so computing z-scores it isn't really essential other than to obtain the "nice" interpretation of standard deviations above or below the overall mean. You said in your initial post that the professor wanted to achieve a 0.25/0.25/0.5 weighting for the three sections. The formula he used will only do that under very specific circumstances relating the standard deviations and number of points in each section (you can work out some example conditions -- fun exercise!). So, if that was indeed the goal, then perhaps your professor is clueless. But there isn't anything inherently "incorrect" about the scaling used.

Your profile is very strong. While it's true that the bar for admission is higher for international than domestic students, I would be absolutely floored if you didn't get offers from several, if not most, of the places you applied.