Stats Classes at Duke

[throatybeard]

My friend is a Foreign Language/Social Sciencey person pursuing a PhD in Educational Research and Policy Analysis. She wants to know about Statistics classes at Duke. Can anyone [with a more recent knowledge of curriculum and faculty than I have] offer some advice about what they presently offer?

[4decadedukie]

Excellent, graduate-level, course(s) at Fuqua; the BEST single class I ever had, in nineteen years of formal education.

[hughgs]

My friend is a Foreign Language/Social Sciencey person pursuing a PhD in Educational Research and Policy Analysis. She wants to know about Statistics classes at Duke. Can anyone [with a more recent knowledge of curriculum and faculty than I have] offer some advice about what they presently offer?

I am familiar with 3 STAT classes offered to the undergraduates. If she hasn't taken an introductory course in stats it might behoove to audit a course before diving into a graduate stats class.

STA101 - What I call baby stats. It's geared towards students who want a good overview of probabilities, estimation, and hypothesis testing. The math isn't very hard but you get a good overview of the material.

STA103 - This is the more rigorous version of STA101. Same material but heavier on the math.

STA113 - This is the engineering stats course. A lot more about the theory behind parameter estimation and includes more distributions other than Gaussian. They still do the probability topics and I'm reasonably sure they cover hypothesis testing though I won't find out for a couple of weeks.

At Duke, statistics really covers three topics - probability, statistics, and hypothesis testing. I think your friend needs to figure out what areas she is interested in. Is she interested in being able understand their use in published papers? If so then a basic stats course should work well. Is she worried about understanding the use of statistics in her own research? In that case she may be more interested in how the engineering stats course (depending on how reliant on stats her research is).

Beyond what the statistics department offers there are a number of other courses out there. For example, PSY117 is a statistics course for the psych majors.

Good luck to her.