The Grand (Grad School) Finale
My grad school search drew to a close last week with the delivery of thank-you gifts to the professors who wrote my letters of recommendation. It was an interesting few months, full of fun things like introspection, writing, and research, as well as not-so-fun things like the Mathematics GRE subject test. I know that I’ve been keeping you in suspense about my decision, so without further ado, the winner is… me.
Seriously, I had some amazing choices at the end of the day that I’m so thankful for. Here’s how it all shook out (by acceptance/rejection in alphabetical order with financial aid information where applicable):
- Harvard: accepted, additional $18,000 from James Mill Peirce Fellowship
- U California, Berkeley: accepted, NSF Vigre Fellowship
- U Michigan, Ann Arbor: accepted, additional $6,000 from department
- U North Carolina, Chapel Hill: accepted, merit-based Doctoral Merit Assistantship
- U Wisconsin, Madison: accepted
- Duke: withdrew application after accepting another offer
- Stanford: rejected
The five programs to which I was accepted are excellent programs within some of the best research institutions in the world. At the end of the day, though, I was most impressed by… UC Berkeley. I accepted their offer a couple of weeks ago and will be moving to the Bay Area in a few months!
Here are a few things that impressed me while visiting and researching the UC Berkeley experience:
- Research: Berkeley claims to have “the broadest range of faculty research interests of any statistics department in the world.” They don’t provide any numbers to back up that claim, but it is true that faculty activities cover an incredibly broad range of disciplines. Anything I want to do, I’ll be able to do it with some of the best in the world.
- Cross-disciplinary opportunities: Applied statistics is necessarily a cross-disciplinary venture. And in addition to have explicit designated tracks in two areas of personal interest (computer science /informatics and computational/genomic biology), Berkeley is home to top-10 departments in almost every field.
- Current graduate students: The students I met were an impressive bunch of individuals from across the world. The domestic students were great, and the international students weren’t all just from China and India: I met students from Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and Brazil during the student meet-and-greet.
- California: I’ve wanted to live in California for a long time now. And while I realize that the golden days of California are over and that the state is having some issues these days, I think it’s still going to be a phenomenally cool place to live. The Bay Area, especially… I’m definitely a NorCal kind of guy.
- Community: Though Boston has been a great place to live for the last 5 years, Boston’s coolest things happened a couple hundred years ago. Berkeley’s coolest things are happening this week. Responsible food, renewable energy, biking all over the place, etc. Sign me up.
- Campus: Loved the Berkeley campus. Enough said.
It’s strange that my Boston days are suddenly numbered, and heading to the West Coast is going to be a big change for me, but I can’t wait to get this adventure underway. Go Bears!