Making Up For Subpar Grades

[discreature]

Hi all. Currently I'm a second-year undergrad who is interested in applying for Stats Ph.D programs my senior year. Overall, I'm relatively on track in terms of taking courses, getting involved in research, and such. I have one potential glaring hole though, my first year the transition to college was a bit tough, and I got some Bs in relevant courses. Namely Calc II and Probability. Almost all Stats programs emphasize these two courses as being important. Retaking these courses would be possible but I don't think it's worth it since it's just a B, but how can I show future grad schools that I'm not actually weak in those areas?

 

I currently plan to take mathematical statistics (which has probability as a strong prereq) and perform well there, as well as take stochastic processes and perform well, but what courses could I take/things could I do to make up for my Calc II grade? Is high performance on the GRE (or Math Subject GRE) and higher level math courses enough, or is there something else? Or perhaps I'm overthinking this.

[geekusprimus]

At least in physics, grad schools usually care more about your grades in your upper-level coursework than your freshman year. I would guess it's similar for statistics, since they probably care a lot more about whether or not you can construct a statistically rigorous sampling algorithm than whether or not you can prove a Gaussian integrates to the square root of pi.

In other words, taking some upper-level coursework should be sufficient. If your school doesn't already require it, multivariable calculus would be a pretty good way to prove that you learned calc II well enough.

Edited April 27, 2020 by geekusprimus