Chapter 3 Resources
Here are a few miscellaneous links to resources that may save you some time.
3.1 Books
You can find a large portion of the textbooks required for classes online. Since it doesn’t make sense for people to repeat the same search every year for textbooks we have assembled a dropbox folder containing all the currently known books. If you find a new book make sure to Slack it to Nick and he can add it.
3.2 Comprehensive Exams
You can check out the official biostatistics graduate department comprehensive exams page and sample exams from previous years
Below are some resources that previous students have developed to help you prepare for the comps
3.2.1 First Year
Lucy’s 1st year comps survival guide has printable flashcards and cartoons based on Foundations of Statistical Inference and Fundamentals of Probability
Nathan’s inference notes and probability notes outline many of the main ideas, formulas, theorems, etc. tested on the 1st year comps. You can use these as a starting point to develop your own study guides
John Muschelli, a former Johns Hopkins biostatistics PhD student, wrote a blog post with some good tips for first year comprehensive exams
3.2.2 Second Year
The 2nd year comp is a one week take-home exam. In some ways there is less time pressure than the 1st year comps, but more work and in-depth thought is required. Here are some tips:
Read through the entire exam once or twice before you start working on individual problems. This will allow you to note what topics are relevant for each problem and come up with a strategy for how to allocate enough time to complete each section.
You can get a head start by making a template for the analysis part of the exam. Check out past exams to get an idea of the general format for your template.
If you are doing simulations or models that take a while to run the
cache=TRUEchunk option in Rmarkdown can save a lot of time. Consider separating the code chunks that run the analysis (e.g. fitting models) from code chunks that use the output of analysis (e.g. plotting predicted values or summarizing model fits). That way you won’t have to re-run the time consuming code chunk if you only want to tweak a graph or summary table.
3.3 Orals Exam
Here are a few orals exams document examples offered by some students who passed their orals. As of 2024, the student handbook requires the following for the orals exam:
To help focus the examination, the student prepares and presents a literature review or an active exploration of an advanced statistical method or concept. The presentation typically takes 30 minutes. The student also prepares an overview document that summarizes their review or exploration and demonstrates synthesis, familiarity, and command of the topic as well as outlining potential avenues of future research.
The orals exam requirements varies a lot among advisors and depends a lot on dissertation progress.
| Name | (Then) Advisor | Quote: Requirement from Their Advisor | Link to document(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Megan Jones | Simon Vandekar | The only ‘requirements’ were a written document over some statistical topic and corresponding slides for the exam portion.Since I had already finished one project and was starting on another, he basically advised me to put the paper I had done as one of the sections (so it is the bulk of my written doc) and do some lit review related to the next project. | Slides and Document |
| Yeji Ko | Ben French | One page background literature review and presentation slides. | Slides Document |
| Max Rohde | Frank Harrell Ben French | I just sent in a rough draft of my tutorial paper in Statistics in Medicine (first dissertation paper). | Paper |
| Lan Shi | Dandan Liu | Dandan has only required presentation slides and no overview document is required. | Slides |
| Joshua Slone | Bryan Shepherd | I think Bryan considers the document as a Pass/Fail completion requirement. He provided more feedback about the presentation. Also, though, the content was very similar so it applies to both. | Slides Document |
| Ruby Xiong | Simon Vandekar | It is my first disseratation paper plus a literature review for my second dissertation paper. Simon did not care for document format so I experimented with quarto website. | Document |