Perspectives: international applicant changing fields

[CherryBlossom_]

Hello, guys!

I've been reading your posts for the past few weeks and I finally got the courage to share my story and ask you for advice!

I picture myself as an "unorthodox" applicant... I'm Brazilian (international), 29 years old (a little older), majored in Chemical Engineering 5 years ago (years away from academia) and have worked in Finance (where is Engineering?) for all these years. I wonder if there's something in my favor here hahaha

I worked for the largest retail bank in LatAm as a credit risk modeling professional; that's when I "fell in love" with statistical modeling. It was a pretty good job but, long story short, a financial institution is not the perfect place for someone who likes to get to the bottom of things, to really understand concepts etc... eventually I started to feel like something was missing and decided to quit and follow my long-held dream to move abroad and go back to academia (focus: research in financial statistics).

I know my profile is far from usual (just read 2nd paragraph). I'm well aware that: 1) I've been away for a long time; 2) I'm changing fields here. It would be a long shot for me to be accepted directly to a PhD, so I'm taking one step at a time and starting out with a MSc. I'll get the feeling of going back to school, will take important classes I didn't have as an engineer undergrad and will have attended a school more well known abroad. My university is ranked 1st in Brazil (110-ish worldwide), but I know competition among international applicants is fierce and a "domestic" university would help me get to a better PhD program afterwards.

Here are my stats:

International: Brazilian

Undergrad: Chemical Engineering, university ranked 1st in Brazil

Undergrad GPA: 8.3 out of 10 (top 3%). My university issued an official document stating that the highest grade is usually 7.0, and that our grades are absolute (not comparative).

IELTS: 8.0 (9.0 reading / 8.5 listening / 7.5 speaking / 7.0 writing)

GRE General: 158 V (80th), 165 Q (88th), 3.5 W (41st =/)

Work Experience: 5 years as a credit risk modeling analyst at a major retail bank. Logistic regressions, optimization techniques, neural networks, random forests etc, you name it. Solid experience with MATLAB, SQL, R, C, SAS.

Research Experience: to be honest, none. I worked with one professor for 3 months in one of his projects (he's one of my recommenders), but the project was all about MATLAB and chemical engineering stuff. I don't think it's something worth mentioning =/ Obviously, no publications for me.

Letters of Reference: I've been switching between 4 recommenders: 2 undergrad professors (both of them are in the chemical engineering field... one of them works with computational mechanics and the other with kinetic reaction modeling) and 2 former bosses... one of them has a post-doc in computational neuroscience and the other one a PhD in Statistics (both of them work with statistical modeling nowadays).

Statistics / Math courses: that's the point... my grades weren't that great in my 1st undergrad year. I've never failed a course but even so my grades may run against me.

Calculus I: 6.5/10 / Linear Algebra I: 6.1/10 / Computing: 8.7/10 / Calculus II: 5.6/10 / Linear Algebra II: 5.7/10 / Numerical Calculus: 7.3/10 / Statistics I (that's the only Statistic course I've had): 6.8/10 / Calculus III: 8.7/10 / Calculus IV: 9.7/10

Questions:

1) Does my rationale make sense (going after a MSc first etc)? Will I have a shot trying to apply for PhDs after it?

2) About grades... do you think it's that bad? Even with the official document from the university stating that the highest mark is usually 7? Of course I had plenty of engineering courses with a heavy math workload, but will they matter for the adcoms?

3) Would I be competitive for top tier schools? I've been advised not to apply for the top 10 (because I wouldn't be able to be accepted anyway), and I followed this advise... now I wonder if I should at least have tried =(

4) There're some applications still open for MSc programs (Columbia, NCSU, Wisconsin (DS), Minnesota, UC Davis and Ohio State). I'm quite insecure right now (haven't heard from my 1st options yet), so I'd like to apply for one more program... which one of them would you recommend? Unfortunately us Brazilians have to deal with highly unfavorable currency rates (picture that: my savings being divided by 4 haha)... so we're dealing with a budget restraint here. Even so, I'd like to attend a solid program.


Thank you very much, and good luck to us all ?

Edited February 18, 2019 by carolina89

[Stat Assistant Professor]

It would make sense for you to obtain a Masters in Statistics or Mathematics first in order to alleviate concerns about your mathematical ability and your lighter math background -- at the very least, you need to take real analysis and some upper division/graduate-level math classes to demonstrate that you can do proof-based mathematics. Assuming that you perform well in your Masters program, I imagine you have a very good shot at schools in the range of Ohio State, UIUC, and University of Florida. I think that those would be your best shot, though you might also be able to get into a school like University of Minnesota or Texas A&M.

There are graduates from top universities in Latin America who get into top-tier PhD statistics programs in the USA (e.g. Jose Zubizarreta is from Chile and got his PhD at UPenn Wharton and is now a professor at Harvard, and Carlos Carvalho who got his PhD at Duke is from Brazil).  So you finishing in the top 3% of your graduating class at the top university in Brazil will certainly work in your favor, and I think you can get into a respectable PhD program in the U.S.