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Growth [in statistics majors] has been spurred by both supply and demand. More students arrive in college with an interest in statistics thanks to the launch of an Advanced Placement examination in the subject in 1997. The number of high-school students taking the college-level test has more than tripled since 2001, to 149,165 last year, according to the College Board, which administers the examination.
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<p>About 25 years ago I was a very good math student in high school but not interested in pure math. I never considered statistics as a major in college, but now I would and would so advise a high school senior with a similar profile.</p>
<p>I think anyone who can learn to program should do so. High school students and gifted middle school students could learn to program in R, a free and widely-used programming language designed for statistics.</p>
<p>I showed this to D as she is taking AP stats this year. She will majoring in ChE so stats is not currently her choice. Her opinion of her stats class is that she sees where it will be useful, however, she feels Calc. is more “elegant”.</p>
<p>The article also mentions that there has been a 42% increase in the number of job openings in statistics, analytics, and “big data” at the jobs website icrunchdata compared to three years earlier.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s because I went to a huge state flagship, but by the time I got to college, there was no discernible “cool” group anyway. Thought we’d left that behind to the high schoolers.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4–I agree, although I do think on some campuses, especially those with a strong Greek presence that some Greeks’ are “better” than others :D.</p>
<p>THere are more statistics majors now because of the AP exam? Is that what the author is trying to say? He sees the number of exams and statistics majors both increase and he concludes this? Seems like a little bit of a leap to me, considering all the other possible factors involved.</p>
<p>I know this is off topic, as the article has nothing to do with this. But since others brought it up . . . when I was in college, the kids who thought there were “cool” were the ones in fraternities and sororities. Sorry, but I found their behavior to be annoying.</p>
<p>Statistics is a must especially as science gets further and futher out there. E.G. the discovery of the Higgs Boson was confirmed by statistics.</p>
<p>“data warehousing” refers to the extraction of data from other sources into a data warehouse. There are lots of good jobs in that area but there are probably more jobs in using the data.</p>
<p>I find this thread to be quite interesting in an ironic way. Among most hardcore STEM people I’ve been around in school and the workplace…Statistics was regarded in the same way that Industrial Engineering/Operations Research* was regarded among Engineers. </p>
<p>A major for those who can’t cut it in “real math” or “real engineering” respectively. Got a taste of that on the negative end when some mathy HS classmates and engineering co-workers were dumbfounded as to why I took statistics** considering I had already completed my math requirements by talking calculus. In their eyes, it’s like someone who successfully completed proof-based algebra/geometry/trig who subsequently took a basic arithmetic course meant for 1-2nd graders. </p>
<p>A dismissive notion made more ironic considering some of the people who struggled the most in the summer stats course I took were math, engineering, and mathy econ majors who had a hard time understanding that in addition to knowing what to do with the numbers…one also has to know and critically analyze what they mean in the given context. </p>
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<li>It was commonly derided by other engineering majors/graduates I’ve encountered…especially those in EE, MechE, or even CivE as essentially a business major offered in the engineering school. </li>
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<p>** I took it for fun and because I thought it may come in handy in my personal and working life.</p>
My firm does both. We hire a lot of industrial engineers, statisticians, ORs, CS, financial engineers. We teach them how to program and do analytics.</p>
<p>And it’s data warehouse, not data wearhouse. I haven’t heard the term wearhousing either. I’ve been working on a widely used data warehouse product since 2000 and have worked with data warehouses since the mid-1980s.</p>
<p>If you look at university course descriptions, it isn’t hard to find courses or certificates in data mining. It’s harder (I actually haven’t seen any) to find courses or certificates in data warehouse outside of companies that make data warehouse products.</p>
<p>Also, you don’t have to have a data warehouse to do data mining. You can work off large data sources that aren’t stored in a data warehouse.</p>