<p>AP statistics usually falls into the list of “easy self-study APs” on the AP forum. Probably means that it is really high school level statistics. It is actually good that high schools offer statistics, but not so good that they needed the incentive of an “AP” label to do so (and it is misleading because acceptance of AP statistics for subject credit in college is significantly less than AP calculus AB or BC).</p>
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<p>Some college courses and their books in statistics for social studies, business, and biology majors make use of calculus, although a “light” calculus for social studies, business, and biology majors course should be sufficient for that purpose.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, there appears to be a huge demand for near-STEM business majors. What I mean are business majors with computer based concentrations. Some examples are Business Information Technology, Business Information Systems, Accounting and Systems, Supply-Chain Management and so on These typically require just a few truly technical classes like a Java programming or database design class mixed in with the regular business curriculum. I know of several recent and soon-to-be grads in these majors from large state Us. These schools were heavily recruited and most everyone in the major with a 3.0 or better had at least one job offer by Thanksgiving. I know of one student with a 3.5 gpa who received job offers on 6 out of 7 interviews. It is certainly worth pointing out or suggesting to your otherwise business inclined students.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t understand how you can solve actual physics or mathematics problems without paying significant attention to detail. I had reasonable conceptual knowledge, but I always screwed up in the details.</p>
<p>Another caveat: some of the job prospects in chemistry (another one of those STEMs) are also pretty grim. Green energy? Maybe. Pharmaceutical research? Not so much.</p>
<p>Biology happens to be the most popular STEM major. It does seem that there are students and parents with the misguided impression that all STEM majors have good job prospects. Journalists, politicians, business people, etc. who talk and write as if all STEM majors are similar in this respect may be contributing to this impression.</p>
<p>What are we pushing kids into STEM for? For jobs and future career prospects? If that’s the case, then I think the answer is no - you really can’t “force” someone into a mold that just won’t fit.</p>
<p>However, I agree that everyone should be exposed to the STEM subjects. For example, we really don’t need that many chemists (hey, if you need some, I know a lot who are looking for jobs!) but we DO need chemically-literate (or scientifically-literate) citizens. All too often, it seems, people are “scared off” by science or they think it’s for “nerdy” people… when it’s really for everyone.</p>
<p>In physics and math, the details tend to be more intuitive; if you forget, you could derive them from scratch. In engineering, you are often presented with some system with certain parameters that can’t be derived from scratch. Even when equations are involved, sometimes you would be given equations that came out of nowhere that you couldn’t derive, like, for example, in fluid mechanics in chem E. It’s just a different animal.</p>
<p>I probably spent an hour out of class at most on calculus, whereas in college, I spent 8-10 hours trying to understand stats and do the homework. The fact that people who can’t do calc think AP stats is easy tells me that AP stats is watered down so much that people leave with very little. If all they are doing is chugging through formulas, the useful info that people take away from it probably could be condensed down to 20 min.
I work in a field which statistics is used and all people need to actually use from stats is the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>what is the average, median, standard deviation, standard error? (people probably already knew what these were before the class)</li>
<li>concept of statistical significance</li>
<li>p-values less than 5 for statistical significance</li>
<li>non-random sampling doesn’t yield reliable results</li>
</ol>
<p>OK, class over LOL.</p>
<p>People don’t really need trig or geometry if they aren’t going into STEM fields either, if you are going to argue from what needs to be used. That’s not why they make everyone take these subjects. The point is to develop abstract thinking.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t know what you mean by “details”. I’m not talking about facts and formulas and constants or specialized equations and whether you remember them or not. I’m talking about paying attention to details while you do the work. It seems to me you have to pay attention to detail to be able to derive something from scratch.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s different at the graduate level. I have BS degrees in both biophysics and electrical engineering. I took a course in Methods of Mathematical Physics and one in Advanced Engineering Math and I don’t recall huge differences in the level of attention to detail I needed to solve the problems. Same with, say, junior level Physics E&M verses Electromagnetics for Engineers. I do remember differences in the level of approximation we allowed ourselves, but IIRC we did more approximating in Engineering class than in Physics or Math. (although I could be misremembering that - it’s been a while)</p>
<p>Don’t people in both Physics and Chem E have to learn Bernoulli equations? Don’t people in both disciplines need to pay attention to detail when working the problems? Granted, you may specialize more as an engineer later in life, I’m talking about learning the subject matter in undergrad.</p>
<p>^I’d bet there are more people who use calculus than ever have need for more statistics than are on my short list. In bio and social science, there are people who use power series too to predict how many subjects will be necessary for a study, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>Perhaps someone could illuminate us on which careers are stat-heavy (beyond my aforementioned short list of concepts.)</p>
<p>“People don’t really need trig or geometry if they aren’t going into STEM fields either, if you are going to argue from what needs to be used. That’s not why they make everyone take these subjects. The point is to develop abstract thinking.”</p>
<p>No, they make everyone take them because they are part of an inherited academic tradition. Granted, logic and abstract thought do appear to be things that must be deliberately taught, but math isn’t the only way to get there.</p>
<p>Philosophy departments teach courses on logic. Such courses are often considered easy by math majors, but hard by those who avoid and fear math.</p>
<p>Um, not really. First of all, statistics is based upon calculus. If you want to go far enough in statistics to actually get a job in it - even just an applied statistics degree, you need at least a year of college-based calculus and a class in linear algebra.</p>
<p>I work at the intersection of the health sciences and psychology, and your 4-point list (and the last one isn’t even true; the vast majority of our body of knowledge in the social sciences and health sciences is based on non-random samples) covers perhaps the first two weeks of the intro to statistics course you take as a freshman or sophomore psychology major. I do pretty extensive statistical work, but even the most basic of research support positions needs to know far more than that. I’m talking about BA in a social science working at like a market research firm or a testing company or something - they’re going to expect you to at least be able to read and interpret basic inferential statistics like ANOVA, t-test, regression, and certain non-parametric tests, and they’re going to want you to know how to use SPSS (which is a statistical package you use to do the analyses).</p>
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<p>I would divide “stat-heavy” into two fields - social science stats (which don’t require a background in calculus) and mathematical statistics (which does), although there’s some overlap.</p>
<p>Social science stats:
Research psychologist - all fields, but especially quantitative and mathematical psychology
Industrial-organizational psychologists (develop tests to help businesses decide who to hire, and analyzes hiring patterns for productivity)
Certain research sociologists
Market research analyst/sales research
Educational testing and measurement/psychometrics (develops standardized tests for people like ETS, ACT)
Lots and lots of federal social science statistician (CDC, Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Defense, FDA, city and county government…on and on. They hire both social science and mathematical statisticians)
Nursing research
Public Health
Demographers (follow population trends over time)
Sports management (somebody has to track player stats!)
Survey research
Political science</p>
<p>Mathematical stats
Statistician (obviously)
Biostatistician (analyzes data for health studies; they are everywhere: hospitals, federal agencies, universities, private industry)
Bioinformaticists
Epidemiologists
Pharmaceutical research
Financial engineers
Operations research analyst
Economists
Quality assurance/improvement/business analytics
Computational biologist/mathematical biologists
Certain types of physicists
Actuaries/insurance/risk analysis
Metereologists and atmospheric scientists, astronomers
Ecology/environmental sciences
Computer scientists (especially data miners)</p>
<p>If I could go back in time, I’d double-major in psychology and mathematics and then get my PhD in biostatistics or quantitative psychology. My actual BA is in psychology, I’m currently getting my PhD in public health psychology, but I do plan to add an MS in statistics afterwards (hopefully while I work, and maybe my job will pay for it!). I know enough to be a social science statistician, but I want more - I like statistical modeling and statistical research, and I really like stats consulting and teaching stats.</p>
<p>To answer the question, though, I wouldn’t push a kid into a STEM field (I don’t have any children, and probably won’t have a college-aged kid for at least another 23 years). I do like math and love statistics, and I also love health psychology, but it’s the passion for the field that keeps me going - kept me going in college, and keeps me going now that I am grinding through my PhD. Passion - or at least a healthy liking - of a field is really important, and intrepid and ambitious philosophy and history majors can find jobs too. Even though their unemployment rates are higher, the fact of the matter is that MOST of them are employed somewhere. My emphasis would be on the development of transferable skills and a well-rounded, yet focused, college pursuit.</p>
<p>From the time the kids were in elementary school I involved them in many STEM activities and did a lot of teaching myself. I treated arts and humanities were treated more as hobbies for them. Both DW & I have STEM careers and provided enough exposure while they were young that all three now are pursuing STEM careers. While we wouldn’t have pushed them to a specific field (DS didn’t take a course in BIO after 9th grade, and we weren’t upset), I certainly wouldn’t have encouraged them to major in a variety of fields.</p>
<p>juillet, a very good list. thanks. I think it is worth pointing out that in addition to getting the mean, median and SD and doing significance tests, in many of the professions on juillet’s list, the purpose is not necessarily solely to test hypotheses, but probably more importantly to analyze data to identify potentially meaningful patterns. This requires tools and thinking more meaningful than what is on collegealum’s list.</p>
<p>“probably won’t have a college-aged kid for at least another 23 years”</p>
<p>Spoken like a statistician!</p>
<p>BTW, it’s been a very long time for me since college, and i don’t remember all the classes I took, but at this point in my medical career, I think it’s very important for me to be able to look at a piece of research and say…"hmmmmm…something’s fishy here…"even if it takes me awhile to figure out why. Just out of training I could probably say what was wrong or helpful about a given study.</p>