creed_the_third

I mean that just because most of the faculty have a Ivy league background doesn't mean that they are necessarily more well known in a field than someone from Florida.

That really doesn't say much about how good the research that is being done is.

According to Stanfords website only 14% of applicants get admitted to their masters, so it's not that easy . Though I assume that the applicant pool isn't as strong as for a phd program.

As far as I know most masters programmes are mostly interested in if the potential student has the mathematical skills to succeed. I think your work experience is good in that it puts your application in perspective and that you might write an interesting SoP, but I'm unsure how much of a merit it will be in its own right. I do not think it will matter what school you take analysis and linear algebra at, as long as it has a decent math department. You really should also try to take a calculus based mathematical statistics and probability course.

Isn't there a lot of grade inflation at some "elite" private universities? It might be easier to get a good GPA at Stanford than at Georgia Tech.

I cannot answer which is best for purely statistics jobs, but I think Cornell OR degree would make you competitive for a broader range of jobs than a MA in statistics. I would choose Cornell since it is much cheaper.

Well, the professor said that you should tailor your SoP around the specific department and the research done there, but one should be a bit careful when namedropping, since one has to have a pretty good idea of what that faculty member works on otherwise it might come of badly. But it might be that I misunderstood.

Interesting. One of my professors advised against mentioning specific faculty members in SoP, that it might hurt more than it helps, but I guess it varies between departments/people.

I don't think Cornell recommends it? Washington does though.

I thought that the graduate students that are most in risk are those not in STEM fields? The recent (during the fall) strike was about about tuition wavers for College of fine and applied arts, not LAS that the stat department belongs to: http://www.uigeo.org/faa-tuition-waivers/

As I understand, the reason programs want to see that an applicant has taken analysis is not only for the sake of the subject matter, but also learned the rigor and demonstrated some proof writing ability. The gre subject test is only multiple choice questions so they won't really test that part. In addition to that, not many questions are on real analysis on the exam - you could probably skip every real analysis question and ace everything else and still end up with a 95%ile. But I see now that you've taken advanced calculus, which seems to sometimes be the same as undergraduate real analysis

I'm no expert but to me it seems like you have a pretty competitive profile already, did you only apply to top schools? I think Berkeley MA would help especially if you take real analysis and some more probability theory there and maybe get some good reference letters from famous professors.

What's your math background?

Perhaps on the master level, but if you have a phd I still think prospects will be good a long time. I'll be applying to stat instead of biostat though since I don't want to pigeon hole my future in one area (and I'm not any more interested in applying statistics to biodata than any other type of data).

Bound to happen... good job prospects (in academia as well as industry), good pay, not much barrier of entry in form of prereqs and overall interesting area.