ENAR student paper awards

[biostat_prof]

I just got back from ENAR last week, and I know many people are trying to make decisions about where to attend grad school right now. I thought I would give people one more data point to consider, namely the number of ENAR student paper award winners from each department. For those of you who are not familiar with ENAR, it is the biggest biostatistics conference in the country. Every year ENAR hosts a student paper award competition wherein students submit papers (typically a subset of their dissertation) that are evaluated (blindly) by faculty at various schools. This year there were 20 winners out of (I think) about 160 entries. It is interesting to observe which schools produce the largest number of winners, because it gives some insight into which programs are the "best." At the end of the day, the biggest advantage of attending a "good" department is that you will have more opportunities to do high-impact research. If you win an ENAR student paper award, that suggests that faculty familiar with your research think that it is good research, so other things being equal you would expect "good" departments to produce more student paper award winners.

 

Having said that, there are some major limitations to these results, as there are with almost all rankings of graduate programs. One major limitation is the fact that West Coast schools typically do not attend ENAR. (The western schools usually attend WNAR instead.) So the lack of any winners from UW, Berkeley, and UCLA (and any other western departments) is mainly due to the fact that they don't typically send students to this conference. Also, larger departments are obviously more likely to have winners than smaller departments. And it's possible that some departments are more likely to encourage students to apply for these awards. I have no idea what the denominators are for the number of students at each department who applied. Also, this data is noisy given the small sample size. So interpret these numbers cautiously. But it gives you some idea of which schools have students that are producing good research.

 

So without further ado, here are the numbers of student paper award winners by department for 2012-2014:

 

2014

 

UNC: 7

Minnesota: 3

Hopkins: 2

Penn: 2

Wisconsin: 2

Florida State: 1

Harvard: 1

Michigan: 1

Rice: 1

 

2013

 

UNC: 4

Hopkins: 3

Michigan: 3

Harvard: 2

NC State: 2

Florida: 1

Florida State: 1

Pitt: 1

Temple: 1

Waterloo: 1

Yale: 1

 

2012

 

UNC: 5

Hopkins: 3

Harvard: 2

Pitt: 2

Florida: 1

Florida State: 1

Michigan: 1

Minnesota: 1

NICHD: 1

Penn: 1

Texas A&M: 1

 

If anyone wants to look at the numbers from even farther book, you can do download the ENAR program books, which are available online:

 

http://www.enar.org/meetings.cfm

 

The numbers are mostly consistent with conventional wisdom, with Harvard, Hopkins, UNC, and Michigan consistently producing the largest numbers of winners. UNC is a bit of an outlier. I've gone on record as saying that UNC is underranked by USNWR, and I like to think these numbers support that claim. Granted, I don't think UNC is quite as good as these numbers make them look. I have to wonder if they encourage more students to enter this competition (or just send more students to ENAR period). But I do stand by my claim that I certainly wouldn't rank UNC (or Michigan, for that matter) on a "lower tier" than UW/Harvard/Hopkins.