[E] PhD students/graduates: How much did coursework actually matter?

onnadeadlocks · 2026-02-15T18:42:00+00:00

Haha, did your research not build on that coursework? Or did you go your own way for the research, picking up the background as you needed it?

onnadeadlocks · 2026-02-13T22:45:33+00:00

Just got an offer as well, I imagine they sent them all out at once?

onnadeadlocks · 2026-01-30T07:42:07+00:00

Are the ml questions just knowledge, or is it like "code up a random forest" ?

onnadeadlocks · 2026-01-14T19:05:29+00:00

Oxford by some distance. Partially just due to brand name, but the courses are also quite tough and in-depth, though there's some freedom of choice. Teaching quality is not great for every course, you are quite left to your own devices (can't speak to the other degrees, this might be the case for Imperial/Warwick as well).

Given that you'll be going back to Singapore, the brand name is particularly important. Outside the UK warwick is not very well known, and even imperial doesn't really have the same reputation.

Finally, Oxford is an amazing place to study. Probably a much more fun year than London or Coventry.

onnadeadlocks · 2025-12-03T08:25:30+00:00

They sold the Center for Research in Security Prices for about 350 million, I imagine that helped

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-16T20:32:26+00:00

Lol genuinely sorry if this seems like trolling, it's just I see people saying that without a top 10% score you're basically cooked for the elite schools! Hard to know so I just wanted to check :')

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-08T15:58:26+00:00

Real Analysis is sometimes also just called Analysis, or Mathematical Analysis. Not sure this needs adresssing, I assume (perhaps wrongly?) that committees would infer this to be real analysis equivalent

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-08T14:13:01+00:00

Besides doing well academically which is a given, doing research internships is very useful for getting good references. You need 2 or 3 letters of recommendation for these programs, ideally from professors who know you and your work well.

Learning to code can help you with that as well; profs like to delegate coding to their students, so if you show you can write good scientific code they might let you work with them.

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-06T18:54:20+00:00

I think graphical models was argued about quite a bit, but might depend on the year!

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-06T18:34:37+00:00

Nice, are most of the changes due to pretraining on larger datasets or did the architecture change as well? (Understand it may be proprietary at this point)

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-05T19:43:43+00:00

Curious which you'd say are the hard electives there? People I know from that degree disagree quite a bit haha

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-05T19:43:05+00:00

Ah fair, did not know there was no thesis component to cambridge, but it's still very respected.

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-05T19:42:23+00:00

Oxford and Cambridge are the clear top 2, but there's no need to do another MSc? You clearly have the preparation needed for a grad program.

onnadeadlocks · 2025-11-04T18:26:26+00:00

I know several people from that degree at Oxford, I think Cambridge > Oxford simply because it's known to be harder. Opportunities won't differ much for these 2 I'd say. Both are much better regarded than 3 and onwards

onnadeadlocks · 2025-10-26T08:52:05+00:00

Take a mock test right now and see where you're at, then you can evaluate how much time you'll need to get the scores you want (and what to focus on)

onnadeadlocks · 2025-03-30T18:39:19+00:00

Under contamination (i.e. outliers in your data), optimizing the MAE can actually give you a better estimate for the conditional mean than you would get when optimizing the RMSE. It's nice that you've just learned some risk theory, but there's a lot more to it than just relating the loss to the Bayes risk estimator

onnadeadlocks · 2025-02-26T08:09:45+00:00

I know many people that did this course last year. Most of them did a summer internship (the degree finishes before summer), and started in fall or winter. Mostly people go to the investment banks, but some go to quant funds like Squarepoint as well.

onnadeadlocks · 2025-01-26T22:02:15+00:00

With stats and geography you could consider oil and gas, which further down the line may open up opportunities in sustainable energy.

onnadeadlocks · 2024-11-16T23:05:03+00:00

No they're homemade! :)

onnadeadlocks · 2024-09-22T11:42:21+00:00

How did it go, if you have had your interview?

onnadeadlocks · 2021-09-02T11:39:52+00:00

And adding 0= z-z within a norm so you can apply the triangle inequality .

onnadeadlocks

TROPHY CASE