<p>I know how valuable and rare electives are for Engineers but one class I've been very suprised by how often I've used the material is Statistics for Engineers. It might have a different name at your school but a fundamental understanding of statistics is a worthwhile thing to have. Make sure it uses some sort of computer analysis (mine used Minitab, which is also used by the company I'm interning for.) Anyway, just a suggestion that might help a few people out when making their schedules.</p>
<p>Can I ask how you made use of this material? I remember reading a few posts here a long time ago saying that statistics is useless for engineers. Personally, I haven't had the need to use statistics in my studies or work. What major are you in? And what kind of work does your company do?</p>
<p>Depends on your school curriculum. The engineering major might required it in one school while in another its an elective (Before I transfer, my previous school require ALL engineering majors to have one course in statistic). The course can be boring sometime, but I thought it was extremely useful for an engineer.</p>
<p>In MechE at my school, its used for quality assurance in manufacturing. eg 6sigma</p>
<p>I should've known that... I was literally just reading up about 6 sigma yesterday.... wow, I'm slow, haha.</p>
<p>I agree with chuy, statistics has a very nasty way of showing up when you least expect or want it. </p>
<p>I have used it in machine elements/material processing for quality assurance, material science for impurities, engineering finance for everything and in some advanced level engineering classes.</p>
<p>While you don't have to love statistics, it is very helpful to understand and know how to use it.</p>
<p>I had to take a class in statistics. It was even called Engineering Statistics. However, instead of solving problems and working things out, we tended to just have to prove things and not actually use it in any way. We did have labs that made use of minitab, but they were laid out in such a way you just clicked on everything they told you and never actually learned anything (if your graph showed the data in a different order or you didn't match their prescription exactly, the TAs would mark you down).</p>
<p>I really wish I had had a good statistics class.</p>
<p>You could make it through engineering without ever taking the class I'm sure, it's just helpful to know sometimes. I'm doing research and it's nice being able to look at data and figure out a confidence interval for a set of data. In other words, I get a large dataset and I can figure out that theres a 99%, or 95% or 90% (etc) chance that any given data point is going to fall within certain bounds. If it doesn't then it's an outlier, and it's likely that something went wrong.</p>
<p>The better example is when I'm doing process improvement stuff, which is really more of an industrial engineering type thing than materials science. They use an absolutely obscene number of charts to track how the process is going, including control charts and other sorts of things I learned about in statistics. We use excel to make most of them but a couple that require a lot of analysis are put into minitab. To be honest a lot of it is over my head but I do have some grasp of what they're doing with the data, and I think that helps.</p>