He holds a bachelor's degree in Mathematical Statistics from Wuhan University, a master's degree in statistics from UIUC, and a Ph.D. in biostatistics from Tulane University.
Bachelor's DIY application for master's and doctoral degrees (20 in total).
Undergraduate:wuhan university, statistics （gpa 3.6）
Undergraduate Application TOEFL:101 out of 120
gre:
First time 1200
Second time 1350
Admissions:
Ph.D. (offer):University of Kansas, University of Cincinnati are all statistics.
Master's (AD):uiuc,columbia university,purdue university, penn state university，university of wisconsin-madison，queen'S University (Note: Queen is Epidemiology, others are statistics).
Master's DIY application for doctoral degree (5 schools in total).
Master's:university of illinois, urbana-champaign, statistics （gpa 3.89）
Master's application to retake TOEFL:112 out of 120
gre：I didn't take the test, because it took five years.
Admissions:
Ph.D. (offer):The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Tulane University are all biostatistics.
Tulane Biostatistics 2015 Top Student.
I myself have relatives who are professors abroad, so I am hereWhen I first entered university, I was ready to go abroad for graduate school instead of going to graduate school in China.
I wanted to be admitted to the Fudan Department of Mathematics in the college entrance examination, but I failed the exam and wentThe Department of Statistics of the School of Mathematics of Wuhan University.
In 2006, the college entrance examination in Wuhan was to fill in the scores, so I knew that I could only apply to Wuhan University.
After deciding on the school, I was worried about what department to apply for.
At that time, I didn't know anything about the Department of Statistics, and my choice of this major was completely decided by my family.
When I chose it, I didn't expect it to become such a popular major today.
Because I was very entangled in choosing a major, I had a chat with my relative who was a professor in the United States, hoping that he would give me some guidance.
My relative is a professor in the Department of Education, but I have always done some educational statistical data analysis or something, so I strongly recommended that I choose the Department of Statistics, and then told me that statistics are very popular in the United States, and that in the future, when I go abroad, I can go to a big consulting company, a financial company or something (at that time, I felt that consulting companies and financial companies were high, and there were no elites.)
But now that I understand it, I know that there is not so much money but the life is multiplied, which is a later story).
At the same time, my dad went out to socialize and chatted with the vice president of a company, and the vice president also recommended my dad to let me choose the statistics department.
That vice always came back from studying abroad. Both channels told me to choose the Department of Statistics, and I was not such an assertive person at that time, so I followed my parents' advice and wrote the Department of Statistics.
I remember when I enrolled in the Department of Statistics of Wuhan University in 2006, statistics was still a very unpopular secondary discipline major in China.
At that time, there was no big data, no data science, and no concept of artificial intelligence.
It has also been in the past decade that artificial intelligence has become popular.
I remember that there were only a dozen people in the statistics class in my freshman year, but by the time I was in my senior year in 2010, there were almost 60 people, because in 2010, everyone had gradually realized the value of statistics as a major.
That year, statistics began to become popular, and the statistics department in North America, even the department of biostatistics, and the department of bioinformatics, as well as the medical information (health informatics) or something, to be honest, most of the departments were occupied by Chinese tutors, this situation is actually 2010, and Chinese professors generally tend to recruit Chinese students because it is easier to communicate and more hard-working.
I've actually been preparing to go abroad since my freshman year.
When I was a freshman and sophomore in the Department of Statistics, I wanted to study hard and get high in GPA, so I went to the study room of the School of Mathematics in the mountains at 7 or 8 o'clock every day, and after finishing classes and club activities, I went to the study room at night and went back to the dormitory at 11 o'clock, just in time to turn off the lights.
At the same time, he also actively participated in some club activities such as the chorus club, basketball club, and even went to be a class president for a year.
From my freshman year to my senior year, I was always an excellent student and won various scholarships.
GPA is the threshold by which you can apply to a good schoolMany schools do not have specific GPA requirementsBut at least a lot of the top fifty schools have a GPA of 30 still wants it.
If you have a GPA of 2.2 percent, it doesn't mean that you can't apply to good schools, but you need to do a lot of other similar internships to make up for your low GPA.
I actively participated in various club activities at school, in fact, in order to show that I have certain leadership skills, teamwork skills, and the ability to coordinate and handle multiple tasks when I applied to write PS abroad.
But the preparation to really start doing the English TOEFL GRE is in the junior year.
In my junior year, I enrolled in TOEFL and GRE classes at Wuhan New Oriental, and took the bus for an hour from Hankou to Wuchang every day.
At that time, a group of people were in the youth of one goal, and now I look back on it very enthusiastically.
Basically, it is a variety of lectures and red treasure books to simulate real questionsYou ask me if there is any secret, there is no secret, in fact, it is to listen more and practice more, and the quantity changes to the qualitative change.
Especially reading, positive and negative words, and composition, it is still very effective for professional institutions like New Oriental. Some people might say that I can practice on my own, of course.
However, we should pay attention to professional people to do professional things and do things in the most efficient way. If you pay money, in exchange for the teacher's question type routine summarized by the teacher after more than ten years of exams, the fastest way to solve the problem, I think it is worth it, because it saves you a lot of time to prepare for others.
People are 24 hours a day, and time needs to be spent on the cutting edge.
Taking my own example, I think the New Oriental training is very useful to me, especially the logical routine of writing essay summaries is really easy to use, so that I can quickly locate logical errors and save more time to focus on writing.
There are also some essays categorized by finance, law, environmental protection, etc., and each one prepares some of its own templates, which allows me to spend more time on the organizational structure when I take the exam.
As for TOEFL listening or something, it is to listen to the news a lot. Actually, even after ten years in the United States, I still don't dare to say that I understand all the news 100% of the time, butEven now, I often turn on the TV and watch the news of other companies to practice my listening. It's really effective.
If I'm tired of listening to the news, I'll watch a few episodes of Friends and ***, and I've been able to fully understand them without reading subtitles).
At that time, at school, I used to eat from the cafeteria at noon, and I came back to watch American dramas while eating.
Yes, when many other dormitories were watching idol dramas and domestic dramas, I watched American dramas for two whole years at lunch, as well as various reality shows.
So as I said, the quantity changes to the qualitative change, be patient, and you will suddenly find that your hearing is better one day. But a certain amount of effort is indispensable.
There may not be a return for paying, but there must be no return for not paying. There is also the need to actively go to the too stupid sustenance forum to have a look.
There are a lot of good materials for past exams, and even a lot of good materials for chicken (machine) essence (scriptures) or something.
At that time, I didn't report the TOEFL locally, but I remember that my mother and I took a plane to Nanchang, Jiangxi to take the test.
At that time, the test was about 101,102 (the full score of TOEFL is 120).It's basically enough to apply,But in fact, after going to the master's school, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), I was forced to take a semester of English speaking and writing classes because my TOEFL speaking score was not high enough.
So my suggestion is that it is better for students to take the TOEFL test at a higher point or to take the college entrance examination.
There are actually many benefits:
First of all, the higher the better.
The second is that you don't need to take this kind of English improvement class after you go to the school you applied to, and you can save your time for other things.
In addition, many school jobs or teaching assistant jobs in the department require your TOEFL speaking score, and if it is low, you will not be able to apply.
In addition to English, I also started to form a team with my classmates in my junior year to participate in digital and analog competitions or something.
At that time, there were not as many data competitions as there are now, and the Mathematical Modeling Competition (MCM) is a competition that our mathematics school will participate in if it wants to go abroad, because it is an international competition, so if you get the first or second prize, you may apply to a very good school.
Now, there are a lot of data science competitions, so I can team up with my classmates to try to get a ranking or something.
Because even if you are not a statistics related major, if you participate in a data competition, you can still write it as a good plus point in PS.
Why, it represents your passion for data and your willingness to put effort and time into it.
If you can't have a lot of research or internship experience during your undergraduate years, this is also a good thing to write in PS.
Group photo of the whole class after graduating from college (I was the one in the front row carrying the blue schoolbag).
I actually took the GRE twice, the first time it was only 1200 (equivalent to 308 now) and the second time it was 1350 (equivalent to 317 now).
Therefore, I suggest that you can start taking the GRE test in your junior year, because it takes five years, and if you don't do well, you can take the test again before applying.
When I took the second exam, I remember that I was really ruined, and I pulled out the network cable at home for two months, just to memorize words for questions, and memorize words in the red treasure book, Brother Monkey or something.
I started to prepare for the application after the last summer vacation of my junior year, in fact, in addition to continuing to take professional classes in my senior year, I was writing ps.
My strategy is to write in Chinese first, not English at the beginning.
Because Chinese is your native language, you can write down what you want to express clearly and logically.
Then translate into English, at this stage, you can find an agent to help you change your English, or the foreign seniors in the department who have gone abroad or the foreign students in the school.
The advantage of the intermediary is that it can not only help you change your English, but also help you add, delete, check and correct, screen and highlight the content that the interview committee wants to see the most, and do the corresponding professional content optimization.
Again, if spending money saves you time, I think it's worth it.
But what I don't recommend is that I don't have any ideas at all, and I don't even write Chinese well, all to the intermediary.
You know yourself best, and you need to learn to Amway yourself.
This ability is actually an ability that Lao Mei values very much.
English is almost fine, but you have to discover your strengths first.
Bit by bit can be written, and what the intermediary can help is what I said to highlight the key points, optimize the content, and correct the grammar.
Because I'm DIY, I'm looking for my relative's daughter, my cousin, who is a serious abc.
She is now a full professor at a university in Canada.
At that time, she was studying for a PhD at Queen in Canada.
So I wrote Chinese myself, bumped into English, tried to correct it as well as possible, and then sent her to change my grammar or something.
It has been changed several times back and forth. The resume is also, first Chinese and then English, and then change the grammar.
It is not recommended to have more than two pages on your resume at any time, which is true for applying to schools, and in fact, it is also true when looking for a job.
Like when I was involved in recruitment, we didn't read more than two pages, for industry. If you need to write a long resume when you are looking for a teaching position in the academic world, that is really CV.
The short one is generally resumed.
With PS and CV resume, the next step is to choose a school.
Actually, in retrospect, DIY wasn't so wise in retrospect, because at that time we were all stupid to look at the overall rankingsHowever, many of the overall rankings reflect the quality of undergraduate teaching.
When we apply for graduate and doctoral studies, we need to look at the college rankings, and we also need to go to the department of the school you are interested in to see the supervisor.
This is really important.
But for me as a DIY, workload is really big, and I really don't understand, so I can only bite the bullet.
For graduate students, the geographical location of the school, the subject and the special ranking are actually more important than the overall ranking.
After you work, you will find out why some master's degrees from some prestigious schools are not as easy to find jobs as students at some branches in California.
This is the geographical location, and there is the computer science that people may learn and the finance that you learn. Unless it's a top of top school, like the Ivy.
Other schools before the first 150 actually have a lot of good professors.
There's actually an unspoken rule of the industry here, and I mean, for example, if you're a Ph.D. from Harvard or Stanford, you might go to a 30-50 school to become a professor after graduation.
If you are a PhD from a 30-50 school, you may go to a 50-100 school as a professor, and if you are a 50-100 school with an additional charge, you will go to a 100-200 school to be a professor.
If you can follow a good young professor, in fact, the school is not as important as you think when looking for a job.
Because you can make the most of your boss's connections.
If you think about it, your boss's boss may be very good, once this relationship is established, it will be beneficial for you to post articles and find intern faculty and staff.
There are many people who know that it is necessary to set magnetism, yes, but it must be screened and skillful.
The professor receives too many letters every day. You have to catch his needs all at once.
What is the need of a professor, that is, you are interested in what he is doing and really understand a little bit.
If you have relevant research experience or even articles, it is useful.
Another thing that I only learned when I came here is that many young professors don't get much funding in the first place.
So went for oneIn fact, it is not easy for ordinary schools to recruit PhDs.
In fact, there are not a few people who personally go into battle to enroll PhDs on one acre and three points of land.
So how do we know what he's doing now? Just go to his official website to check it well, go to see the articles sent, and when you joined the company. This is all very useful information.
In the area of magnetism, I really recommend finding an intermediary, or is it the same sentence that professionals do professional things.
It took a lot of time and energy for me to do this myself, but the final effect was not good.
Professionals can help you sift through information and guide you to the right professor for you.
Most of the magnetics mentioned above are PHDs.
For master's degrees, because they are all self-funded now, in fact, the possibility of being directly selected by the tutor is not high, so PS, GPA, GRE, TOEFL or something will be more important.
Moreover, the current schools in the United States are very poor, so the threshold for some majors is not as high as everyone thinks.
It's just a matter of getting the right medicine.
Be confident.
Then there is the letter of recommendation, which is actually not difficult, to find the teacher of the class with the highest GPA, to ask for one, to find the head of the statistics department to ask for one, and then to ask for one from the teacher of mathematics. But remember to be sure to find someone who has crossed paths. That's what makes it credible.
UIUC's iconic statue in front of the Department of Mathematics.
Finally, let's talk about school selection, my strategy for choosing a school is actually a hierarchical and mixed application, and the majors applied for are only statistics.
That is to say, I will apply for both the master's and doctoral degrees, and I will boldly apply for the master's degree, and the doctoral degree will be the main requirement to stabilize the top 100.
The reason for the doctorate is that Wuhan University is still a little less competitive than universities like Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, and University of Science and Technology of China.
And there are a lot of those schools who stay in the United States to teach.
There are a lot of people who like to recruit from the same school.
For example, the original stalk of UIUC was that a flower pot fell upstairs and smashed a student, and there were ** out of ten Tsinghua University and University of Science and Technology of China.
I applied to a total of 20 schools, both in Canada and the United States.
The application fee of $1 or 200 per institute is also DHL mailed.
Because I didn't find an intermediary for my own DIY, I could only cast a wide net, and I felt a little sorry for my mother's silver.
Good master's schools have my dream school University of Chicago, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Berkeley, Duke, UIUC, Texas A&M.
There are Columbia, Purdue, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania State or something, and I voted for my cousin's school, Queen's University, in Canada, but I thought maybe I could be an alumnus with my cousin and have a personal care.
For the master's degree, Purdue was guaranteed at that time, because after all, it was self-funded, so he was bolder.
The doctor is a lot more careful, Ann Arbor, Rice University, Duke, Yale, all have voted, dreams still have to be had, what if they come true, Kansas, Cincinnati, these guaranteed ones.
Because the results are released in April, many schools can generally vote in November and February. Senior year is all about applying for applications.
During the winter vacation of my senior year, I went to Beijing with my friends to attend the annual statistics conference of Renmin University, which is now quite high, because many Chinese professors who won COPSS awards have gone and watched a lot of speeches.
At that time, the professors who first discovered statistics were doing disease-related research and data, and many of them were related to biostatistics.
For the first time, I discovered that health care is a very good field in the United States.
It also laid the foundation for my current career in this industry and my Ph.D. transfer to biostatistics.
So, when you are in college, it will be beneficial to participate in this kind of school, so it is good to travel.
You'll have a lot of information that will allow you to see the wider sky.
In my senior year, I was actually waiting for the results, and during this period, I went to take a driver's license and wrote my graduation**.
Around April and May, that's when the results come out.
The master's degree is still good, like UIUC, Purdue, Columbia University, Wisconsin, and Penn State.
The only regret was Chicago, when I was emailed that I was the first person on the waiting list, and I was not selected.
I was stupid at the time and didn't contact it, but now that I think about it, anyway, at my own expense, what is the essential difference between them recruiting 25 and 26 people, in fact, no.
If I had tried harder, I might have done something different.
This operation is actually completely feasible here in the master's degree, and the other is that Queen's University automatically transferred me to the epidemiology department and returned the money, which is very confusing.
It's difficult to get a doctorate, good universities are indeed unsuccessful, especially what makes me haunted is Rice University, I refused in seconds, the glass is heartbroken, my current husband is Rice's PhD, he later told me that I applied for that year Rice statistics is basically not recruiting the mainland, of course I am relieved now.
Ph.D. I only got PhD offers from Kansas and Cincinnati.
At that time, I thought Cincinnati was not good, but now I think it's actually very good, basically all the doctors there can go to cleaning and internships at the largest children's hospital in the United States.
One of my current Chinese colleagues is a Principal Data Scientist, a PhD in Cincinnati.
So you see, in fact, studying abroad is just a new starting point for you, and your final job search depends on many things, your school grades**internship. There is not only hard work, but also opportunity.
Looking back now, in fact, the flaw of my undergraduate DIY is that I didn't have a lot of success because I basically didn't have any good research experience.
Moreover, the ranking of the Department of Statistics of Wuhan University is not very good in the country, although basic mathematics is very good.
The best application in my stats that class turned out to be just a PhD offer from Purdue.
If I had been guided by an agent at that time, I might have been able to apply to a better school.
There is actually a disagreement in our family on the question of whether to go directly to a doctorate or a master's degree:
My dad thought that he would go to the University of Cincinnati, which is a city, with many Fortune 500 companies, and he pays his salary every month without tuition.
But my mom still insisted that I get a master's degree from a good school.
In the end, we chose UIUC.
The main reason is actually that the town where my relatives live can get to Champagne in 40 minutes by highway.
My parents thought it would be better to have relatives to cover me.
It's really good to think about it now, I'm much happier than many UIUC classmates, for example, I stayed at my relative's house during the winter and summer vacations, and then my relatives helped me go to the bank to open an account and familiarize myself with the environment.
So in early August 2010, I flew to the United States for the first time at Shanghai Pudong Airport.
In fact, it was the World Expo that summer, and our family spent a week in Shanghai to watch the World Expo.
My memory at that time is very vague, I vaguely remember that the World Expo that year was really crowded, and the rest of the memory is that the moment I entered the security check, I looked back and saw my mother crying. And the moment I got on the plane, I cried into tears.
In fact, there were not many master's degrees in statistics at UIUC, about 20 people, and there were also students from Fudan University of Science and Technology of China.
The entire department is across from the Department of Mathematics.
I remember renting a house at that time, living with two female champions of Tsinghua University in Jiangsu and Xinjiang.
The two top students not only taught me how to cook, but also taught me what it means to study.
So in the second semester, after I fully adapted, I started a career of five courses in one semester and moved closer to being a top student. There's a reason for thisBecause UIUC you take 3 courses a semester and 5 courses a semester was a price at that time.
At that time, I thought that learning more would save money.
So you can imagine that every day of the week is due, due, due, final week, every day is a miserable situation of exams.
In the two years of master's degree, I only needed to graduate with 32 points, but I took 52 points.
In school, I also work part-time for professors to change their homework and earn a little money to buy coffee.
At the same time, he went to the laboratory of a professor in the Department of Bioinformatics to work as a free research assistant and do data analysis.
It's been a tiring and fulfilling two years.
In addition, during the summer vacation, I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan at my own expense to participate in the summer training, which strengthened my determination to do biostatistics.
After that, I retook the TOEFL in the second year of my master's degreeI applied to five PhD schools, among which the Houston Medical Center in Texas also successfully applied magnetism, although I didn't go in the end, but I got the interview by magnetism. It is also thanks to my experience as a research assistant for free.
The letters of recommendation I found were written by teachers from the Department of Statistics who were A+, teachers who worked as research assistants, and teachers I met who went to Michigan to take classes.
It is easy to apply again, and it is easier to apply in the United States itself than to apply directly in the mainland, because your platform is different.
Ph.D. graduated. In the end, I chose Tulane University, mainly because of the good public health and the high scholarship.
After that, it was a five-year Ph.D. career.
In fact, a lot of things have happened to the doctor, and there are times when he is very depressed, depressed and confused.
Because it is true that this journey is a bit long, it is more important to train your ability to work under pressure.
This way, you will be able to persevere in the torment of finding a job in the future. A Ph.D. can be the most frustrating when you're finally going to defend your graduation and look for a job.
Moreover, finding a job in the United States is becoming more and more difficult every year, and it takes a lot of hard work and perseverance.
If you have the opportunity, I can talk to you about career planning, in fact, the sooner you understand this, the better, after all, you want to stay here for a few years after coming to North America to study, right?
These are all later words, now looking back on my study abroad career, it seems that there are ups and downs, from a giant baby who relies on his parents for everything in China, to now being able to calmly pursue his dreams in the American workplace and realize his own American dream.
Actually, I'm not the kind of person who admires foreigners, I came to the United States more to prove that I can pursue my own life without relying on my parents, and I am very successful.
So far, it's going well. I also hope that everyone can realize their dreams smoothly on the road to application.