Dear Fellow Student:
We welcome your interest in Carnegie Mellon's graduate statistics program.
We all have recent experience in applying to graduate programs in probability and statistics. We greatly appreciate that your choice of school is important in establishing who you will become as a professional and/or scholar.
At CMU, you will be challenged to think for yourself and to set and attain goals. You have your own background and so you get to set your own objectives in how you spend your time here. Some students decide to take two years of masters level work; some take one year. Others with more extensive backgrounds in mathematics and statistics may take one or more of the Ph.D. core courses their first year, and then supplement this coursework with the more application-oriented master's level classes in subsequent years.
Classes are taught by faculty who have established themselves in the statistics research community as dedicated scholars, but we can attest that they also make the time and effort to teach and supervise our work, and to be accessible outside of class. Faculty promotion decisions emphasize teaching ability in addition to research ability.
Another resource available is a state-of-the-art computing environment. In classes and research, you will use widely known statistical software. In addition, you will be frequently encouraged to solve problems using your own programming. Furthermore, statistical computing as an area of research is of interest to some faculty and students in the department. The statistics department has strong research ties to Carnegie Mellon's computer science department, computer and electrical engineering department, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Nearly half of the Department's 42 workstations are for the exclusive use of statistics graduate students, so we rarely have any difficulty getting access to these machines. A system administrator is available for hardware and software concerns. Computing is a heavily emphasized element in many student activities, including research projects with faculty, coursework, and thesis research--of course, some would add computer games to this list!
Yes, we have our fun too. Friendships develop outside of work, and groups will often go out to one of the great nearby restaurants, bars, museums, cultural institutions, or sporting events. We also have teams in several intramural sports, including basketball, softball and water polo. There are many city and state parks in and around Pittsburgh for year-round recreation, and we sometimes organize short excursions in the great outdoors.
Indeed, Pittsburgh has shed its reputation of heavy air pollution, mainly because of its dramatic shift away from the once predominant steel manufacturing industry. Our quality of life is characterized by inexpensive housing, a low crime rate, excellent public transportation, and a climate with a pleasant change of seasons. Although often thought of as a midwestern city, Pittsburgh is also near the mid-Atlantic East and does not suffer the harsh winters experienced by many cities in the northern Midwest.
We are confident that this guide will help you better understand what studying probability and statistics in our department is like, and we encourage you to visit and see for yourself.
The Graduate Students (1996-1997)
Comments about CMU Statistics from students and alumni.
