Stats PhD/Biostats MS profile eval Thanks!

[sibyllwang]

Hello Mathematicians and Statisticians (what a mouthful!),

I'm a huge list person so here it is:

Undergra school: Top 20 liberal arts college in cornfield (literally) with an okay Math/Stats department

Demographics: Asian female international (F-1)

GRE: Verbal 161 Quant 170 Writing 4

GRE Sub Math: just took last week, not expecting anything better than 50%

GPA: 3.68 General 3.57 Math (it wounds me, I know) 

         Also have a French major (3.84) and a Linguistics concentration (3.83)

Courses: Calc I(AP)     Calc II(A-)    Linear Algebra(A)    Combinatorics(A-)    Abstract Algebra(C you see why the sad math GPA, how damaging is this?)  

               Applied Statistics(A)    Statistical Modeling(A)    Probabilities&Statistics I(A-)

               In progress: Real Analysis 

Research:

- One summer research in my college's CS department on machine learning (OCR on maps) but what I did was really data base integration (huge geospatial data sets) and some regular expression stuff, conference presentation. *Will be interested to hear about NPL/Computational Linguistics programs

- One ongoing semester-long independent research in nonlinear modeling of swim/track data, will do some work in data visualization too.

*Athlete and big sports fan. Will be thrilled if anyone can tell me about a program big on sports data/analysis

Rec letter: one strong, one fairly strong, one okay (what worries me is that all three are from my not so well-known college)

Programming: used R and Matlab in class and research but not fluent in either. More on a "here's a problem, go stackoverflow it" basis. Am taking coursera, will it help?

Work: stats grader for two years

Applying to: 

 - Stats PhD: Columbia (high reach, decided to give a shot for personal reasons), Cornell (high reach), Penn State (reach), UMich (reach), Rutgers (target), BU (target), UConn (target)

 - Biostats PhD: Penn(reach), U Minnesota (reach), BU(target), Rochester(target)

 - Biostats MS: Penn (reach), Yale (reach), Brown (reach) (Big name schools, yeah, makes my dad more willing to fund my master's degree)

 - Computational Linguistics MS: Brandeis (target)

Any suggestion, advice, comment, info, what-were-you-thinking! are welcome.

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[cyberwulf]

I think you're being fairly realistic about reasonable target schools, but I would consider "reach" schools you're applying to is probably too large as I think your chances of getting into any of them As far as Biostat PhD programs go, you might also consider applying to places like Iowa, Pitt, and UTexas.

[sibyllwang]

Hi Cyberwulf, thank you for your reply. Is there a specific reason why you recommended Pittsburgh? It's just that Pitts was never on my map and I want to know if there are things that they are doing that should be considered particularly?