Jeff & Chris,

I want to congratulate you on your excellent performance in
Stat-611.  While your colleagues overall did very well, your
work was outstanding.

You both have excellent intuition and are clever and capable
of generating new ideas. I'd like to encourage you next year
though to concentrate on making sure your informal arguments
can be transformed into correct and formal arguments. To
write a really excellent dissertation (and you as well as others
in your class are capable of doing so), you need to be able to
take your ideas and translate them into something without holes.
You are not there yet, and need to spend time on this aspect of
research.

Stat-613, 614, and 620 is the 3-semester sequence that will help
in this training, but I would encourage you to take a reading
course with someone who is technically proficient, and to go
through a recent paper in a journal and check all the steps,
to make sure you can really understanding the arguments. I did this
at exactly your stage (fall of second year), and it helped me
immensely. Not only did I learn a bunch of new stuff from analysis,
and REALLY learn the central limit theorem and strong law of large
numbers, but more importantly I learned the difference between a 
correct argument and one which looks OK but has holes in it. 
There are plenty of people around (and I won't be since I'm off
to a sabbatical) who have the ability to work with you on reading
a paper, but maybe the best would be  Suojin Wang. As you
know he's a great teacher, and I'm sure he'd be willing to do a reading
course where you do all the reading!

Have a good summer, and work hard studying for the qualifiers.  I'm
expecting great things from both of you!

Raymond Carroll




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Raymond J. Carroll
Professor of Statistics
Member, Faculties of Nutrition & Toxicology
Department of Statistics
Blocker Building, Room 447
Texas A&M University
College Station TX 77843--3143
409-845-3141 (Phone)
409-845-3144 (Fax)
carroll@stat.tamu.edu (email)
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