What is a career/masters in biostatistics like?
How much writing is involved?
How much math is actually involved?
How much do you really get to hear/learn about the science of the research and not just about the numbers?
Do you understand the gist of what your working on or are you basically just handed a list of numbers and asked to make sense of them?
Is the pay worth the job/education to get there?
What was your undergrad in?
Would you change careers/majors if you could do it again?
What are the best and worst parts about the career?
Sorry that this is just a long list of questions! Thanks for any insight you can provide.
There is a lot of math in biostatistics, of course. It’s a math-based and math-driven career. How much writing is involved depends a lot on the position and the educational institution you go to. A lot of stats departments don’t teach a lot of writing, but that’s a mistake, because a lot of statisticians need to communicate their findings in writing to their stakeholders (either academic papers or white papers/reports for companies).
How much you understand and learn about the research and your relationship to the topic really depends on individual positions. I’ve been a statistical consultant before. I’ve worked on projects in which I was involved from the beginning and aided in the research design and measurement development, and I’ve more deeply understood the background and literature for the particular project. I’ve also been involved in projects where I was brought in towards the end to analyze data that had already been collected (and often, not properly). The ideal situation is the former, but a lot of researchers who don’t know anything about statistics don’t realize how important it is to get their statistician involved on the ground floor. So you can certainly be handed a mess, but depends.
Really, one of your jobs as a biostatistician is education - develop a close relationship with your team so they listen to you, and then educate them on how important it is you be involved in the study design if they want help!
Statisticians are paid pretty well. They average about $80K a year. If you want to be a biostatistician, the best undergrad major is statistics. Mathematics will work too. You honestly could theoretically major in anything as long as you minored in math or statistics - take three semesters of calculus, linear algebra, and 2 semesters of probability and statistics; then you’ve met the prerequisites for most MA programs in statistics. But it’s better to just major in statistics or applied math or math if you know this is what you want to do up front.