I’m in a tough situation (not a bad one, but it’s a tough decision). I want to do something like Nate Silver, the guy who forecasts baseball games and predicts all kinds of stuff (like presidential elections). Right now (I’m a senior in HS) my major at the University of Alabama is set as mechanical engineering. I would be fine doing engineering, and I am considering it because of great job opportunities. But, statistics is my passion, and I’m good at it. I guess I have a few questions.
Is statistics a hard field to get a job in?
Would I be fine with an Undergraduate degree only, or would I have to go to get a Master's, PHD, etc. (which would obviously cost more, because I'm going to Alabama on a full tuition scholarship and statistics is not offered there.)
Are there any other majors I should consider that maybe combine both engineering and statistics?
Statistics is a valuable skill. It doesn’t have to be used only in employment as a “statistician.” You need to have advanced and broad enough skills, but you should be able to apply them across a wide spectrum of occupations. Whether you major in engineering or something else, statistics is still going to help you. Nate Silver majored in economics, could have gone to advanced training in that. But what econ did for him, in addition to the specific knowledge of that field, is required him to take perhaps 5 or 6 courses in math and statistics in college. And all of this, plus following his long-term interest in sports statistics, helped him to develop a career in blogging and journalism.
Statistics is extremely valuable throughout the corporate world.
An example from an old job of mine: My client was the sales operations department of a major CPG company that has 20,000 salespeople. We were helping them to shift to a new compensation program that paid people based on their sales versus a target sales amount, but their method of maintaining that target was to just add a percentage to every territory’s objectives. This method was reasonable nationwide, but with the compensation shift, a huge number of employees would wind up losing money because their particular targets were unreasonable, and the inevitable turnover would cause long term pain for the company. The solution? Use statistical analysis to calculate intelligent targets for each of the 20,000 territories. This approach, now implemented, saves the company more than $10MM per year and prevents excessive turnover. In this way, statistics is highly prized in the management consulting industry.
If consulting doesn’t excite you, finance might. Corporate finance departments use statistics to forecast revenues and costs over the coming months, quarters and years, so understanding statistics is crucial to success; some finance employees are more involved in the stats stuff than others.
Even investment banking requires knowledge of statistics. While you will be using a huge variety of methods to do your job, statistics would be one of them.