<p>My choices are narrowed down to these three. I plan on majoring in Statistical Science but from reading their websites I can't find many differences in what their departments have to offer. Any incite would be really helpful. Right now I am leaning towards Duke, though I will visit all three later this month.</p>
<p>[NRC</a> Rankings in Stat/Biostat](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area34.html]NRC”>NRC Rankings in Stat/Biostat)</p>
<p>Also, go to the registrar’s list of courss given this semester at each school, count the courses of interest/relevance that were actually offered in this or related fields, this semester. At Cornell this will span several departments and colleges, probably.</p>
<p>^That statistic is about 2 decades old now so I doubt it has any validity.</p>
<p>Statistics as an undergraduate major is very very new. I believe that in my freshman year, the first seniors were graduating with Statistics as their major. This could be a good thing as you will probably enjoy small class sizes and find your professors more accessible, but the variety of classes may not be great. </p>
<p>Also, Statistics is done almost exclusively as a double major with Mathematics or Computer Science, so you might want to look at those departments as well. I think that you’ll find it necessary to do some coursework in both departments as Statistics is math-intensive by nature, and statistical modeling involves a quite a bit of programming. </p>
<p>I, personally, am a math major and have only taken two courses in the Statistics department and enjoyed both, but I can’t tell you much more about the program.</p>
<p>As a statistics major at Duke, I can say that the department is small but growing rapidly. We just hit 30 declared majors and a ton of stat minors. The department recently got a budget increase and is hiring more professors to handle the increase in undergrad majors. The grad program has been at Duke much longer and has an extremely excellent reputation always ranking among the top 3-5 programs in the country. </p>
<p>The entire department is extremely leaned towards Bayesian statistics (as opposed to frequentist). Many people do double major in something else (most popular being econ). The major is a nice alternative to a major in economics where the department is just enormous, and the academic advising/services seem almost non-existent. Being in such a small department enables you to really know the other majors and develop good relationships with faculty. </p>
<p>If you’re thinking about after graduation, there haven’t been many people graduating since it’s such a new major, but almost everyone is more going towards industry rather than academia. This fits right in with the pre-professional slant here at Duke. Some of the jobs they have gotten include credit card id fraud/theft investigation, data mining and even professional gambling. </p>
<p>Bottom line is, being a stat major at Duke is great because you’ll find a nice small community of other undergrad majors, develop good relationships with a distinguished faculty, have good job prospects after graduation and have more time to do other things in college besides studying since there aren’t many Stat majors making it a non weed-out major unlike econ or bio.</p>
<p>Thank you SriverFX and PPham27, this has all been very helpful.</p>