CAREERS INVOLVING PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS

Please note: This website is no longer being maintined; material may be out of date or links may be broken.

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

Ecological/Environmental Statistics Educational Testing and Measurement
Environmental Health Sciences Epidemiology Financial Engineering/Financial Mathematics/Mathematical Finance/Quantitative Finance
Government Service Industrial Statistics
 Mathematical BIology 
    (See Biomathematics, above)

Medicine
    If you are considering becoming a medical doctor but like math and statistics, you might consider one of the following:
 Meteorology/Atmospheric Science
Nursing Research
Operations Research Pharmaceutical Research Public Health Public Policy Quality Improvement Reliability Risk Analysis (also known as Risk Assessment) Risk Management and Insurance
 Social Statistics
 Statistical Computing Statistics Survey Research

 Last updated 7/7/05. Please note: This website is no longer being maintined; material may be out of date or links may be broken.