Statistically Significant

Even 5 years later, I can still remember the day that I won the Trustee Scholarship from Boston University. The thick, official BU envelope arrived on a Friday afternoon, and after reading it over a couple of times, I headed out to a party in Weston. As I drove into the dark expanse that is Plantation/Weston/The Everglades, I was swimming in thoughts about my future. I had just won four years of full tuition at a respectable research institution in Boston. This was my ticket out of Florida and into bigger and better things. New beginnings and opportunities awaited me.

In terms of the development of my life, that was a Big Day. Prior to that, I had a couple more. If we count 07/27/87 as Big Day #0, I’d say that Big Day #1 was the day that I started at Pine Crest. The fourteen years that I was a Panther had a lot to do with the person that I am today, and none of it would have happened without that first day of school. Along the way, I encountered Big Day #2: the day in fourth grade when I started playing the trombone. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into at the time, but the 9 years I spent playing music were full of cool places and people that I wouldn’t have met had I not decided to join Band on that fateful day.

Big Day #3 and its scholarship sent me to Boston, and it’s quite possible that this past Friday was Big Day #4. Another Friday afternoon, another piece of communication from a university. This time, it was Berkeley, letting me know that I’d been awarded an NSF VIGRE Fellowship in the UC Berkeley Statistics department. (For those of you who haven’t been thinking about graduate statistic programs daily for the last 6 months, Berkeley and Stanford are pretty much universally recognized as the strongest two statistics programs in the US.) Wow.

That said, I’m not committing myself to anything just yet. I still have yet to hear back from Duke, Harvard, and UNC Chapel Hill, which you’ll notice are all pretty prominently displayed on the US News rankings, and Wisconsin is a strong contender. And I’m definitely going to visit any program that I’m seriously considering joining. Still, if I had to point to something that summarized and validated the majority of my efforts over the past 5 years, I couldn’t do much better than that berkeley.edu email.

A closing thought:

After playing the waiting game for 1-2 months, the results of my PhD applications are beginning to roll in. A quick recap: I submitted applications to the Statistics PhD programs at Stanford, Berkeley, UWisconsin Madison, UMichigan Ann Arbor, Harvard, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke.

During the past week, I received two definite responses: rejected from Stanford, a decision I completely respect, and accepted to UWisconsin Madison! (Technically, the Madison Statistics department recommended my admission to the Madison Graduate School, but I’ll make the bold assumption that this is equivalent to being accepted.) I’m hoping to visit Madison during March.

And speaking of visits, I had the opportunity to check out a third department last week: Duke. After flying into Raleigh-Durham International on Thursday afternoon, I had a busy day of information sessions, interviews, a seminar, and meals with current graduate students on Friday. I loved it. The professors are working on a wide variety of interesting topics, I got along really well with the current students, and the department seems to have great attitudes towards promoting student success and tailoring the experience to the individual. Furthermore, I think that I did a good job of connecting with the people there and selling myself as someone who could flourish in such an environment. I haven’t heard the final verdict from them yet, but I have my fingers crossed.

Though I brought my camera with me to North Carolina, there weren’t many opportunities for pictures. Duke’s campus is gorgeous (especially West Campus, where the statistics department is located), but it was 33 degrees and raining for the duration of my visit. And I still had a great time!

(Sorry for the short post this week. Most of my computer time has been consumed by switching my POP Gmail accounts over to IMAP and getting everything configured across multiple devices, including getting Thunderbird up and running on my laptop. Thankfully, everything is up and running. Not doing that again any time soon.)