January 11, 2022
Our world is filled with data and jobs that require data analysis skills.
With so much data, there’s more demand for people who can interpret and understand it. As students show more and more interest in this field of study, Cornell faculty are introducing two new majors: applied statistics and data science.
“A person who graduates with a major in applied statistics or data science can work in just about any field possible because almost every field requires data analysis,” said Professor of Statistics Ann Cannon.
Students might work for a retail company to understand consumer trends, work in sports statistics to understand the effectiveness of a tactic, or analyze results from a medical trial as a biostatistician.
Applied statistics
Cannon, a statistics professor at Cornell College for nearly 30 years, describes statistics as the art and science of data. It’s looking at a dataset and figuring out what messages are within. Often, statisticians work with clients to solve problems.
“Statisticians are able to organize the process and communicate with people who don’t understand statistics,” Cannon said. “They’re able to take the problem, which is generally not well defined when the client comes to them, and drill down to exactly what they are trying to figure out. Then, statisticians think about how to use data to answer that question or give insights into that problem.”
Data science
The data science major merges computer science and statistics. Cannon says data scientists are people who know more computer science than a statistician and more statistics than a computer scientist. It’s a younger field that Assistant Professor of Statistics Tyler George is excited about.
“There is a lot of excitement around data science,” George said. “There are active communities for learning and developing statistical tools, like R, on social media platforms such as Twitter, Slack, and even Twitch. Many organizations hold live data science competitions for students that are very interesting and fun. I think we definitely have the push of the world.”
Students who major in data science or applied statistics could pair it with majors such as biochemistry and molecular biology, sociology and anthropology, or business analytics, among many options if they would like to get a second major.
“Students who combined a business analytics major, for example, with a data science major would have even more technical experience and would be even more attractive to …….
Source: https://news.cornellcollege.edu/2022/01/cornell-introduces-data-science-applied-statistics-majors/