Recommendation Letter trouble

ANDS
Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:42:10 +0000

To be honest, I think the letters are going to be the least of your worries. From your OP I’m assuming your exposure to statistics in college has come from courses designed for Psych majors? Generally these focus on application and not theory; for MS thats not going to be that great of a problem, but you are no doubt still going to be competing against individuals with strong quantitative backgrounds (even if their majors aren’t mathematics - for example econ majors who have perhaps had a class or two in uppder division mathematics).

If you had strong letters that could speak to your ability to make up lower/upper division math deficiencies - they are not going to count calculus as having been met in high school, unless its that calculus that transfers over to college; you’re still going to need Linear Algebra (proof based), and a formal mathematics course (how to write proofs). I think this combination may be a bit too much though, especially considering some of these campuses have Top 50 ranked Stats programs (of course people aren’t knocking down the door to get a stats degree, and if you want to go unfunded by the dept, your chances could certainly improve).

Long story short - w/o knowing your complete undergraduate academic history its hard to say what kind of success you’re looking at here, but the combination of academics outside of mathematics and LOR might not be so great.