(Note: This is the second in a series about graduate life in statistics. For links to all articles in the series, click here).

Here are the best pieces of advice that I can give someone currently involved in a biostatistics or statistics graduate program.

1- Know your interests, and exploit them

Did you sit through a martingale theory lecture and talk excitedly to the professor afterwards? Or, instead, did you start to think you that you would have been better off as an actuary?

These type of gut feelings are useful when it comes to one of the most stressful periods of a graduate student’s career – picking a research topic. My best advice is to (i) find the type of methods papers in statistics journals that you actually enjoy reading, (ii) find a faculty member capable of leading a thesis or dissertation in this…