<p>So I had the opportunity to speak with an admissions officer from Upstate Medical School who told me Calculus was useless and to take Statistics instead. However, I was already taking Calculus at the time and decided to finish a year of Calc by the end of this semester. Following his advice though, I took my first semester of Statistics at the same time. I was just wondering if one semester of Statistics is enough? If possible, I rather not take the second semester of statistics (to save myself time. I see on most medical school requirements that at least one semester of Stats is required, but I'm not sure if it would hurt my application if I didn't complete a year of it. </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>(Btw I'm currently a Freshman)</p>
<p>My D. said that Calc. is useless. She took Stats. She had a credit for AP Calc. I believe you need 2 semesters, so D. had one in HS (Calc) and one in college (Stats). She said that Stats explain procedures used in Medical Research Labs. Frankly, she did not see requirement for Stats at the Med. Schools on her list, but it changes overt ime.</p>
<p>Calc is useless. Wish I took stats instead. Stats was one of my hardest classes in med school so far.</p>
<p>since you have a year of math on your transcript, whether or not you take the 2nd semester of stats is entirely up to you. Stats is a very important concept for science and medicine but college is your last time to learn about other things so weigh those two factors and decide for yourself.</p>
<p>I don’t think it will ever hurt you to take additional classes in a subject beyond a requirement or recommendation but you are not going to be penalized for not doing it. 
If they wanted a year, they wouldn’t specify a semester.</p>
<p>^Wow, D. has never mentioned Stats at Med. School and she is completed her lecture part, in rotations. Stats was the easiest A in UG. She specifically did not take AP Stats so that she could take it in college for an easy A.</p>
<p>D1 (another MS3) had stats in med school. She thought the class was trivially easy–but she was a math and physics major. She said that those students who had miminal math in undergrad (mostly bio majors) had a good deal of difficulty with the material.</p>
<p>I assume you mean you’ve completed single variable calculus (the college equivalent of high school AP Calc BC; your next course would be multivariable), and introductory statistics (the college equivalent of high school AP Statistics; your next course would deal with techniques to correct for endogeneity such as 2-stage-least-squares).</p>
<p>If so, you’re fine for medical school purposes. I like both sequel classes from a “life skills” perspective, but neither of them is a part of medical school admissions or medical school itself. I still recommend the courses.</p>
<p>I didn’t take stats in HS or college. I took dual-enrollment calc 1 and calc 2 in HS, which fulfilled college and med school math requirements.</p>
<p>My med school doesn’t have a stats class per se, but we do dedicate a nice chunk of time to studying research methods, papers, data from clinical trials, data that is used to formulate recommendations (eg screening tests, treatment plans), etc etc etc. All of this is pretty stats-heavy. </p>
<p>While I don’t intend to have a research-heavy career, I think it would still be useful to have a solid understanding of stats, and for that reason I wish I’d taken a stats class in college. I was a pretty strong math student all my life, and I had some trouble wrapping my head around the stats concepts used in research papers when I got to med school. I’m satisfied with how much I learned in medical school and am glad I can somewhat critique methods sections of various papers, but I think a better stats foundation would’ve been nice.</p>
<p>I personally haven’t needed or used calc concepts since completing the class in 07–or at least, if I have, none of them were memorable enough that they popped into my mind while writing this.</p>
<p>Overall–I agree with what the guy said re stats vs calc.</p>
<p>FWIW, DS also spoke to a SOM admissions counselor that was visiting his campus. He was told that the new MCAT will require stat and that the counselor predicted a movement to a stat requirement by med schools for those currently in their freshman year.</p>