2020 Stat/Biostat PhD Profile -Any Advice?

[moocha]

Undergrad Institution: big midwest state school ( ranked <30 on statistics)
Major(s):  math and stat double
GPA: 3.83

Type of Student: international female

Grad Institution: not good private school (ranked 50-70 on stat US News)

Concentration: statistics MS
GPA: 4.0
 

GRE General Test: 
Q: 170
V: 151 (52%)
W: 3.5 (<50%)
GRE Subject Test in Mathematics:
M: took two years ago, did really bad

TOEFL Score: N/A

 

Programs Applying: Statistics and Biostatistics PhD

 

Research Experience: Summer data analysis in a biology lab, haven't done much, only used basic lm and glm. Another biostat related machine learning summer research in an ivy school, may publish paper, not sure if it can be first author
Awards/Honors/Recognitions: 2 years Dean's list for undergrad, tuition fellowship for MS program
Pertinent Activities or Jobs: tutored for a year, TAed for a year. Both are for introductory stat undergraduate classes. 

Letters of Recommendation: 1 my advisor for my master program, took his class and got an A. 2 chair of the department, took his class and got an A. 3 research supervisor from the ivy school  

Math/Statistics Grades:  Have taken a good amount of undergraduate math courses, got mostly A's, only 2 B+. Have taken master level probability and statistics (Casella & Berger) (A). Also took some applied statistics courses on both undergrad and grad levels. 
Any Miscellaneous Points that Might Help: currently in a stat master program, and plan to take two PhD level probability and inference in Fall 2019

I want to apply to biostat phd program in Columbia, UCLA, Penn, Yale, Brown, BU, Duke, UNC and UMN, and stat PhD in UCLA , JHU, NCSU and UC Irvine. But I have no idea if the goal is too high for me? Which should be reasonable schools to apply?  

Also, my GRE score is one of my biggest concerns. Should I take GRE again to improve my verbal and writing? I don't know if GRE score is that important...

 

 

 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

Your GRE scores are fine. It is just that with admissions being so competitive for international students, your best bet is probably at schools in the general tier of University of Florida and Rutgers for Statistics and similarly ranked schools in USNWR for Biostatistics (of course for "safety" sake, you may want to apply broadly and at lower ranked schools too). UNC Biostat and NCSU Statistics will probably be very hard to crack but it doesn't hurt to try a few reaches.

[moocha]

On 5/24/2019 at 5:59 PM, Stat PhD Now Postdoc said:

Your GRE scores are fine. It is just that with admissions being so competitive for international students, your best bet is probably at schools in the general tier of University of Florida and Rutgers for Statistics and similarly ranked schools in USNWR for Biostatistics (of course for "safety" sake, you may want to apply broadly and at lower ranked schools too). UNC Biostat and NCSU Statistics will probably be very hard to crack but it doesn't hurt to try a few reaches.

I have reorganized my list,

Reach: (20-30) Columbia, UCLA 

Match: (30-45) Penn, Yale, Rutgers, Duke, Brown 

Safety: (>45) UPitt, BU, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCSB

Do you think the reach/match/safety are in the right range? 

[omicrontrabb]

How did you pick those schools? You seem to have a lot of Ivies and other schools with general prestige, which tend to be more difficult to get into than their ranking would suggest. Brown, for example, has an extremely small program, so I don’t know if I would call that a match school. 

Why don’t you apply to Minnesota or Wisconsin or Iowa biostats? Minnesota, for one, is very strong in biostats, and has an acceptance rate of around 25%.

[moocha]

7 hours ago, omicrontrabb said:

How did you pick those schools? You seem to have a lot of Ivies and other schools with general prestige, which tend to be more difficult to get into than their ranking would suggest. Brown, for example, has an extremely small program, so I don’t know if I would call that a match school. 

Why don’t you apply to Minnesota or Wisconsin or Iowa biostats? Minnesota, for one, is very strong in biostats, and has an acceptance rate of around 25%.

Thank you for your comment!

I wrote that draft list mostly based on the ranking and location (which I will certainly change after I do more research on each programs)...Minnesota was in my original list but then I saw that they have rank 24. I thought it might be hard for me. But I guess I need to consider acceptance rate and size of the department. I will look into biostat in Wisconsin and Iowa too.