creed_the_third

I think everyone on this thread is greatly overlooking the importance of recommendation letters. Strong recommendations can cover a multitude of sins whereas lukewarm ones can sink otherwise very promising candidates. I might go so far as to say that they are the single most important part of an application. The only other thing that comes close is grades in advanced math classes, but even that is hard to evaluate at "less prestigious" schools. For applicants with an MS or non-traditional applicants, evidence of research excellence (i.e. publications in good journals) also helps a lot, but it is very rare for someone coming straight out of college to have much of a paper trail in this area.
 
For the record, I would strongly disagree with the claim that undergraduate prestige "matters a lot." Sure, it matters some. If you have a 4.0 at Harvard, you are probably going to be accepted. But I would say that the majority of the students admitted to my department in recent years have not been Ivy League grads but rather students who attended solid state schools and did very well. (And my department is usually considered to be one of the best.) And it's a sample size of 1, but I attended an extreme "no name" undergraduate school and I was still admitted to every graduate program to which I applied. The main difference is that if adcoms aren't familiar with the rigor of the courses at your school, they will rely more heavily on recommendation letters. If a recommender says, "Student X took my proof-based advanced calculus course and got the highest grade of anyone in 10 years," you will be fine. But if you get three tepid recommendations, that may not be good enough.
 
As for undergraduate GPA's, a low undergraduate GPA will not sink you, although the burden of proof will be on you to show that it is not an accurate reflection of your true ability. As I mentioned on another thread, my department recently admitted a student whose undergraduate transcript was almost entirely C's, D's and F's (mostly D's and F's their first two years). But this particular student enrolled in an MS program and got three recommenders saying that they were one of the top MS students in years. They also wrote a publishable paper while in this program. So it is definitely possible to be admitted to a top-ranked department despite a spotty undergraduate record, but you will have your work cut out for you. My advice would be to have a candid talk with your potential recommenders about how strong they are willing to recommend you. If you are in a top-10 department and you can get three recommenders who say that you are strong enough to be in their PhD program, that could carry you quite a ways. And if either of your research projects could result in publishable papers in a good methodology journal, be sure to find a recommender who will say that as well. As cyberwulf correctly noted, your MS GPA probably won't help you that much since usually the curve in these programs is very generous. (If you took some form of advanced calculus/real analysis course where the curve was not inflated in either of your MS programs, try to find a recommender who will say that.)
 
One way or another it's going to be a crap shoot. Your best advice is to apply very broadly. It's unclear to me whether you really cannot stay in your current program or if you just don't want to, but if you are serious about getting a PhD, you should try to make sure you have some kind of backup option. It's really hard to predict what will happen to you. Good luck.

Okay, so I'm very much not faculty or on the admissions committee, but based on my personal experience, I disagree that improving SoPs is a waste of time. Perhaps cyberwulf's department usually doesn't give these essays a lot of credence for what sound like very sensible reasons. But I will say that at least after getting in, I had doors open for me at several departments based on how I had described my professional background and my research interests in my application materials: RAship offers, extra funding, TAships better aligned with my interests. I know from conversations with some of the faculty in my department around visit days last month that they took notice of students who had memorable descriptions of their motivations and potential areas of interest (particularly for applicants who were no longer in school). Sure, everyone has to have the high GPA and the math classes and the strong letters and such, but once you're on the margin -- and isn't being on a lot of waitlists as marginal as it gets? -- submitting a good and well-written story seems like such an obvious way to tip that next time.
 
Also, as a practical matter, I think writing a strong SoP takes up way less time (and $$$) than trying to ace measure theory and learn a broad enough swath of an undergrad math major curriculum to beat a bunch of test-taking machines in the math GRE percentile game. And all while working full-time! It's one thing to do well in upper level abstract math when you're a student and that's all you do and you're in the study groove, but entirely another to do so when you've been away from classes for a while and have inflexible real life to deal with, where another B+ in upper level math or a 50th percentile subject score might be a real accomplishment but won't actually help matters.
 
Not like all these areas of application improvement are mutually exclusive, but I argue to at least pick that low-hanging SoP fruit. A lot of good opportunities were presented to me that would not have been offered if I had written something more generic. Don't forget that there is synergistic potential with writing a great SoP and sharing that with your recommenders before they write their letters next time, too. They might be able to say more emphatic and specific things about your accomplishments and potential once you give them a clear picture of where you've been and what you hope to do.

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. What did your advanced calculus course cover?

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.

I'm a Swede currently studying as an exchange student at UIUC Will apply to PhD program's earliest for Fall 2015 though since I need to finish my civilingenjor's degree first... good luck to you guys who are applying!

I'm a Swede currently studying as an exchange student at UIUC Will apply to PhD program's earliest for Fall 2015 though since I need to finish my civilingenjor's degree first... good luck to you guys who are applying!