CAREERS INVOLVING PROBABILITY
AND STATISTICS
Please note: This website is no longer
being maintined; material may be out of date or links may be broken.
Many careers
involve heavy use of probability and statistics. Most of these
professions are not commonly known. Here are some examples, with links
to
further information. There is overlap between some of the professions
listed here. For example, there is overlap between biostatistics and
epidemiology,
between epidemiology and environmental health, between environmental
health
and risk assessment, between Government Service, Public Policy,
and Social Statistics, between Risk Management and Actuarial Science,
etc. In fact, as the following quote suggests, statistical competence
is becoming important in many fields.
"I keep saying the sexy job in the next
ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that
computer
engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to
take
data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value
from
it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a
hugely
important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level
but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high
school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have
essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce
factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from
it."
(Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics
at the University of California at Berkeley, and Google's chief
economist, in The McKinsley Quarterly, January 2009, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286)
OVERVIEW
OF CAREERS IN STATISTICS (Has more links at the bottom)
Sloan
Career Cornerstone Center
Statistics Occupational
Outlook (from U.S. Department of Labor)
Actuarial Science
Atmospheric Science
Bioinformatics
Biomathematics
Biostatistics
Ecological/Environmental Statistics
Educational Testing and Measurement
Environmental Health Sciences
Epidemiology
Financial Engineering/Financial
Mathematics/Mathematical Finance/Quantitative Finance
Government Service
Industrial Statistics
Mathematical BIology
(See
Biomathematics, above)
Medicine
If you are considering becoming a medical doctor but
like math and statistics, you might consider one of the following:
- Obtaining a Master's in Public Health (MPH) in addition to an MD
degree. See the American Medical Students Association's website How to Get Your MD/MPH
for more information on this possibility.
- Investigate the fields of Public Health (below), Nursing Research
(below), Biostatistics
(above) and Epidemiology (above). Some students who start college
planning to be a physician find that one of these fields really appeals
to
them more.
Meteorology/Atmospheric Science
Nursing Research
- Florence
Nightingale
is often considered the founder of professional nursing. Using
statistics to improve health care was an important part of her
work. She was elected a fellow of Britain's Royal Statistical
Society for her contributions to the statistics of health care.
- Nursing
and Statistics
- UT
Austin Alternate Entry Nursing Ph.D. program (for students with
degees in fields other than nursing who wish to do nursing research)
- See also Public Health below.
Operations Research
Pharmaceutical Research
Public Health
Public Policy
Quality Improvement
Reliability
Risk Analysis (also known as Risk
Assessment)
Risk Management and Insurance
Social Statistics
Statistical Computing
Statistics
Survey
Research
Last
updated 7/7/05. Please note: This
website is no longer being maintined; material may be out of date or
links may be broken.