Statistical Science at Duke, Cornell, or Rice??

SriverFX
Sat, 10 Apr 2010 11:55:30 +0000

As a statistics major at Duke, I can say that the department is small but growing rapidly. We just hit 30 declared majors and a ton of stat minors. The department recently got a budget increase and is hiring more professors to handle the increase in undergrad majors. The grad program has been at Duke much longer and has an extremely excellent reputation always ranking among the top 3-5 programs in the country.

The entire department is extremely leaned towards Bayesian statistics (as opposed to frequentist). Many people do double major in something else (most popular being econ). The major is a nice alternative to a major in economics where the department is just enormous, and the academic advising/services seem almost non-existent. Being in such a small department enables you to really know the other majors and develop good relationships with faculty.

If you’re thinking about after graduation, there haven’t been many people graduating since it’s such a new major, but almost everyone is more going towards industry rather than academia. This fits right in with the pre-professional slant here at Duke. Some of the jobs they have gotten include credit card id fraud/theft investigation, data mining and even professional gambling.

Bottom line is, being a stat major at Duke is great because you’ll find a nice small community of other undergrad majors, develop good relationships with a distinguished faculty, have good job prospects after graduation and have more time to do other things in college besides studying since there aren’t many Stat majors making it a non weed-out major unlike econ or bio.