Profile Evaluation for Stat PhD/Help Narrow My List

[Farge]

Undergrad Institution: Large State School
Major(s): Mathematics
Minor(s): Statistics
GPA: 3.95/4.00

Type of Student: Domestic White Male

Grad Institution: Same Large State School

Concentration: Mathematical Statistics (Masters)
GPA: 4.00/4.00

GRE General Test:
Q: 167 (92%)
V: 165 (96%)
W: 4.0 (60%)
 

Programs Applying: Statistics PhD

 

Research Experience: 1 Peer-reviewed publication, 2 summers of research as an undergrad, presented at local/state conferences for undergraduates (won some minor awards), Graduate Research Assistant for one year, which I assume will lead to a publication
Awards/Honors/Recognitions: Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Scholar, wrote grants which resulted in $5000 in funding for my research, Goldwater Scholarship Nominee, Honors College "Excellence in Research" Award
Pertinent Activities or Jobs: Math tutor when I was an undergrad, Teaching Assistant for one semester, Research Assistant for three semesters in grad school

Letters of Recommendation: Two from professors I have done research with (one young in her career, one a bit older with a good reputation), one from either my department head (who is on my committee) or from another prof on my committee with a good reputation
Any Miscellaneous Points that Might Help: my masters degree (and the qualifying exams I have taken) are the first part of the PhD program at my institution, so I have proven myself in some advanced courses (Measure Theory, Computational Statistics, Asymptotic Statistics)

 

Programs considering:

Personally, I am from the middle of no where in the midwest, and I would ideally like to move to a location with better weather, more interesting terrain, and/or a good music/art scene.
Academically, I am interested in machine learning/computational statistics, and, in particular, like working with text data.  On the side, I am also interested in data visualization. Academia could be in my future, but I would like my program to have good industry ties. If possible, I would prefer a small-medium department to a large one.

 

Very interested:

New York University (NYU) (Data Science PhD) (My favorite program that I have seen. I like the research areas and industry ties, are there other programs like this I could apply to?)

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)

 

Interested:

University of Washington

Columbia University

Iowa State University (Visualization group is very interesting)

University of California, Irvine

 

Also Interested but, I haven't done a lot of research into these departments
University of Chicago
Duke University

Carnegie Mellon University
University of Michigan

 

Do you think I am competitive at these programs? I would like to remove some of these schools from my list and replace them with some safer schools and ultimately end up with 5-7 to apply to. These are also all fairly larges departments, and I think I am much more suited to a smaller one. Any suggestions are welcome.

[StatsG0d]

I think you're in the running for pretty much anywhere you apply. Take and do well on the Math subject GRE and you can probably even have a good shot at Stanford. 

Edited September 5, 2017 by footballman2399
Grammar