USC College establishes new statistics minor
Posted October 11, 2010 at 10:26 pm in News
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Loading ...In an effort to provide students with a basic understanding of how to handle and analyze data, the USC Department of Mathematics now offers a new minor in statistics.
“Whether you’re going to be a journalist or a mathematician, it’s becoming necessary to be able to have a background in analyzing the information in your field,” said Gary Rosen, chairman and a professor of mathematics at USC. “Statistics is really the science of the future.”
Rosen said he was driven to create the minor after reading a New York Times article on the future of statistics.
“The article focuses on how statistics is becoming to be more and more of a useful skill that is increasing in demand for employers,” Rosen said. “With the world expanding with technology every day, Internet-age statisticians are needed to work with large data sets for many popular companies.”
Statistics is the process of making an estimate on certain numbers associated with a population based on a sample. The program is designed for students who want to acquire a basic understanding of modern statistics and will teach students how to handle and analyze large data sets.
The interdisciplinary minor is available to students pursuing any major. There is one math prerequisite, and it requires eight units of math and another eight units of electives in statistics that can be fulfilled in any department.
Statistics is not offered as an undergraduate major, but the school does offer the subject as a master’s degree.
“Since we don’t have a specific statistics department, nobody really takes it upon themselves to start a major or minor. Somebody had to do it,” Rosen said.
Douglas Capone, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, said he believes the minor can be a possible complement to a biology degree and other degrees at USC.
“There are benefits from understanding biomedical statistics. Many companies will be looking for students who are skilled in analyzing data from the results of different experiments in medicine,” Capone said.
Rosen said many students are most likely unaware that the new minor is available.
“People with all sorts of graduate degrees such as comparative studies and humanities are going back to school to get their master’s in statistics because it makes one so incredibly employable,” Rosen said.
Ross Mead, a doctoral student studying computer science and minoring in math, said he would be interested in the minor if it concentrated on a certain type of statistics related to his degree.
“I have to do a lot of studies with human relations and robotics, so it would be helpful to have a minor where I could take classes focused on statistics in engineering,” Mead said. “You wouldn’t think statistics relates to a lot of different majors, but it can be applied to many things.”
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