Hi all,
I am an international student majoring in math.
I would appreciate if you could evaluate my profile for the phd program!
Type of Undergrad: T13 Liberal Arts
Undergrad GPA: 3.88 overall, 3.93 major
GRE: 169Q 155V 4.0W
Math Courses:
Multivariable Calculus (A), Linear Algebra (A-), Linear Algebra II (A), Set Theory (A), Applied Statistics (A), Probability (A), Mathematical Statistics (A), Differential Equations (A), Numerical Analysis (A), Analysis I (A), Analysis II (A), Abstract Algebra (A), Topology (A-), Real Analysis (A), Functional Analysis (A-), Complex Analysis (Planned), Differential Geometry (Planned)
Econ Courses:
Public Economics (A-), International Economics (A), Intermediate Microeconomics (A), Intermediate Macroeconomics (A), Econometrics (A), Advanced Econometrics (A)
Other Courses:
Data Science (A)
Measure-Theoretic Probability, Independent Study (A)
Asymptotic Theory of Econometrics, Independent Study (A)
Letters of Recommendation: 1 from statistics AP , 1 from economics AP, 1 from economics professor
Research Experience:
Summer research with a statistics professor in theoretical statistics, which led to a coauthorship but not in the top journal.
Summer research with an economics professor in econometric theory, which led to a paper but not publishable.
Research assistant to an economics professor for 6 months.
Research assistant to a professor at a top (T3) Asian business school.
Research assistant to a professor at one of the top Asian think tank institutes.
Teaching Experience: TA for analysis and econometrics.
Research Interests: Econometric theory, exploring topics, definitely not into time series
SOP: Mediocre overall, stressing on my research experience during college and why I’m interested/how I took an interest in econometric theory.
Applying to: MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UCSD, Northwestern, UW Madison, UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, NYU, Duke, MSU, PSU, UMichigan, Boston U, Brown, Cornell (20 in total)
Other: Graduating a semester early, proficiency in C/MATLAB/Julia/R/Stata, applying to top statistics programs as well (as long as they allow cross application)
My main concern is that I know my recommendation lettters will be awesome, but they are not coming from well-known professors in academia.
To make up for the weak recommendation letters (letter writers, in fact), I’m seriously considering the “pre-doc” option even though doing RA for empricial research has nothing to do with my research interests.
Do you think I have not-so-bad chance for T20? What about chances for top statistics program (say top 15)?
Thank you in advance for your time :)