Statistically Significant

This is Part 3 of a three-week series about the trip I took a couple of weeks ago to visit graduate programs and family. Part 1 covered my visit to the UC Berkeley Statistics department, and Part 2 covered my stay in Santa Rosa with Aunt Lindsey and cousins Hannah and Hilary.

Bright and early on Thursday morning, Lindsey and I set out to San Francisco International Airport. The drive down was great: northern California is beautiful, and we passed through parts of the city that I missed during my Twin Peaks adventure. Arriving at the airport with time to spare, I had a nice conversation with a girl who had grown up in Berkeley. (General impression: Californians seemed generally more friendly than Bostonians. I like that about you, California.)   

I made it to Minneapolis without any issues. When my connecting flight sat motionless at the gate for 30 minutes, though, I sensed impending delays. Sure enough, there were mechanical issues that forced us to deplane and hang out until they could find another plane, terminal, etc. Long story short, what should have been an early afternoon landing that would have given me time to explore the city and campus turned into a hungry, tired, jetlagged 9:30PM welcome-to-Madison.

Before going to bed, I glanced at my Madison itinerary and saw the following initial items:

• 8:15 – meet in lobby
• 8:45 – breakfast at the Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC)
• 9:00 – information sessions begin!

The “15-minute breakfast in a classroom” sounded a lot like “bottles of juice, muffins, and coffee” to me, so I called upon my super jetlagged powers to wake up really early, snap the one picture I took while in Wisconsin, and head over to the Marigold Kitchen, a 4-yelp-star local joint that was 4 minutes away from my hotel. Two delicious cups of coffee and a huge-ham-and-cheese-omelet-with-some-local-potatoes-on-the-side later, I was ready to rock and roll. And at 8:15, so were the other 6 or 7 visiting students staying in my hotel. The one girl in my group visited Duke with me, so it was good to see her again, and it was cool chatting with some other aspiring statisticians.

Driving over to the HSLC was nice. Temperatures were in the 40s, and students were wearing shorts and skirts to enjoy the balmy weather. The campus is pretty; it’s situated between Lakes Mendota and Monona, and I’m sure that it’s lovely during the warmer months of the year. It was gray and raining while we were there, though. The campus is also quite large. Before I actually arrived in Madison, someone told me that there are 15-minute intervals between classes in order to give students time to get from point A to point B. I asked our driver about this, and she was unable to confirm or deny that, though she said that many students have bikes, rollerblades, and/or cars. (I comically imagined students rollerblading to the bike racks, then pedaling to the parking lots. It’s a big place.)

We arrived at the HSLC, where we were greeted with… bottles of juice, muffins, and coffee! Saw that one coming. We were also greeted another bunch of visiting students, bringing the total to about 15, as well as by a cadre of biostatisticians who spent the next couple of hours talking about their research and the program. One of the major selling points of the UWisconsin-Madison statistics experience is its tight integration of statistics and biostatistics: all students are actually in the stat department and take the same rigorous theoretical stat classes before focusing on either stat or biostat with their later coursework. This is opposed to most other academic institutions, where stat and biostat reside in separate schools on separate campuses with separate professors, courses, etc. Good to know, though clinical trials and experimental design were never hugely fascinating for me personally.

After lunch with what I understood to be many of the domestic students in the program (all 6-8 of them) at the Nitty Gritty Birthday Bar, we had an afternoon of information sessions from some of the more statistical / less biostatistical professors, including a couple doing some interesting biology/genetics work. We were given the opportunity to mingle with students and professors for a couple of hours, which was probably my favorite part of the day, and then it was off to dinner at the Interim Chair’s house in the suburbs of Madison. It was a nice evening, full of good food, beer (which Wisconsinites are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about), and a chance to get to know the other visiting students and professors a bit better. Everywhere I visited, I had a lot of fun talking with the other visiting students. It’s so nice to be able to talk about statistics and computing without boring everyone to death.

I caught the 6AM shuttle to the airport the following morning and had another miserable travel experience. This time, it was inclement weather in Chicago that delayed the first leg of my trip, making me miss the second leg. For a little while, it was looking like I’d be spending the night in Chicago, but I luckily squeezed onto an afternoon flight to Boston. And thus, after a week of travels with stops in 4 states, I was back in Bean Town.
Tune in next week for my final graduate school decision as well as some thoughts on the search!