Final Decisions

[statisticsfall2014]

Hey Everyone, 

Would be interesting to see where people are ending up. Maybe something like the below format:

 

1. School Attending

2. Schools Turned Down

3. Reason for attending, advice for future students. 

 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

1. Attending: University of Florida

 

2. Turned down: UConn, Rice. Removed from waitlist: UCLA.

 

3. Reasons for attending:Fellowship + stipend for UF was more generous than the financial offer from the other two. Additionally, Florida has a great group of professors working in the areas of Monte Carlo methods and Bayesian statistics, which make it a good fit for me. Their application fee was also only $35, byfar the cheapest of all the schools I applied to.

[CauchyProcess]

1. Attending: UC Santa Cruz

 

2. Turned down: SUNY Stony Brook, UC Irvine, UCSB (my undergrad)

 

3. Reasons for attending: got really excited about Bayesian statistics after reading more about the field and $24k full fellowship is a much better financial offer than the TAships the other schools offered.

 

Some random bits for future PhD applicants:

- Don't forget basic conditional probability. Your odds of admission at similarly-ranked universities are highly dependent, and thus you are likely to either get into all, or get into none. Therefore, don't waste money applying to 8 top-ranked schools, of which you have 2 favorites: if you get into one of the 6 non-favorites, you'll probably get into one of the 2 favorites as well. 

- Take the GRE seriously. Admissions committees don't care about it, but if you can get 95%+ on all three categories, your odds of getting a university-wide fellowship are far greater than if you blow off the writing section and get like 37%.

- Your undergraduate institution matters a lot. Unless you are absolutely exceptional (i.e. took two full years of graduate stats courses as an undergrad and ready to pass your quals the day you start your PhD), you may get boxed out of top schools, even if you have perfect grades/good recs/etc, just based on not being in a top-20-math-type school.

- The applicant pool depth seems to be growing exponentially. Your year will be far more competitive than ours.

- Remember, the math does not change based on institution. You will probably be learning from the same textbook whether you are at Stanford or UC Riverside.

- Good luck!

Edited April 15, 2014 by CauchyProcess

[Biostat_Assistant_Prof]

Good lord, has it been a year already? I swear I just posted in last years "decisions" thread, like, yesterday