This page tries to take some of the mystery out of the application process by letting you know what is going on when. The process described here is that in place for applicants for Fall 2006 and later.

The first step is that you must apply! The How to Apply page has detailed instructions for completing your application. We only note here that there are actually two applications, one to the Graduate School and one to the Program in Statistics. You should have finished this step by January 1. We can consider later applications, but funding and space are limited, so later applicants may be rejected simply because we are at capacity.

When your Graduate School file is complete, the Graduate School begins its review. This review takes about a month. Nothing else will happen with your application until your Graduate School file is complete (including the fee).

When your Program file is complete, we begin a review. Each member of the admissions committee in the program reviews every applicant and rates the applicant. In late January or early February, the Program admissions committee meets and ranks all applicants for admission and financial support. The ranking begins with the ratings produced during the initial admissions screening, but the committee rereads, discusses, and reranks files. At the end of this meeting we have a ranking of the top 40 or 50 files; the remaining files are not ranked except to say that they are below the top group. Additional applicants are positioned in the rankings as their files become complete. Admitted students will come from these top 50 applicants. The remaining applicants are notified that their application for admission has been denied.

The Director of Graduate Studies or Director of Graduate Admissions makes the accept/reject decision for the Program based on the rankings and resource availability. Both the Graduate School and the Graduate Program in Statistics must agree on acceptance for the admission to go forward. After the DGS makes the admission decision for the program, the file goes back to the Graduate School, which makes the official notification regarding admission.

For the Ph.D. program, we only admit students whom we can support financially. In the M.S. program, we do admit a few students without financial support.

Suppose that we can support 10 new students next year. We first make offers to our highest ranked applicants. However, these applicants are usually highly ranked by other programs as well and will often receive several offers. Thus we expect only a fraction of our offers to be accepted and anticipate making perhaps 25 offers to obtain our 10 new students. We do not make all the offers at once, however, because more than 10 could easily accept, and we would not be able to meet our obligations. Instead, we proceed by making a limited number of initial offers, along with waiting list notifications.

Students who receive support offers have until April 15 to respond, but some will respond earlier. As we learn of students accepting and declining our offers, we may extend more offers as we go down the waiting list, until we have obtained our desired number of supported students. This means that we often send out more offers in March and April as applicants make their decisions. The process can extend into May.

Once we have a stable list of students who intend to matriculate in the fall, we send out announcements about orientation, summer English training, and other opportunities in the summer before classes begin.