Many careers involve heavy use of probability and statistics. Most of these professions are not commonly known. Here are some examples, with links to further information. There is overlap between some of the professions listed here. For example, there is overlap between biostatistics and epidemiology, between epidemiology and environmental health, between environmental health and risk assessment, between Government Service, Public Policy, and Social Statistics, between Risk Management and Actuarial Science, etc. In fact, as the following quote suggests, statistical competence is becoming important in many fields.
"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer
engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take
data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from
it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely
important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level
but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high
school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have
essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce
factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."
(Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics
at the University of California at Berkeley, and Google's chief
economist, in The McKinsley Quarterly, January 2009, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286)
OVERVIEW OF CAREERS IN STATISTICS (Has more links at the bottom)
Sloan Career Cornerstone Center
Statistics Occupational
Outlook (from U.S. Department of Labor)
Actuarial Science
Atmospheric Science
Bioinformatics
Biomathematics
Biostatistics
This page created by Martha K. Smith, 8/8/01. Last updated 7/7/05. Please send comments and suggestions to mks@math.utexas.edu