Day 569 of 1000
It is tough to get a job these days. I feel sorry for kids in University who need a summer internship or a job when they graduate. Christian plans to go to grad school and has already had an internship so it does not affect him so much. Kelly, on the other hand, wants an internship this summer, so she went to two job fairs at NCSU to get leads. She got six interviews. She has received two job offers so far, but turned down one of them because it was not a good match. She is one of two finalists for a third position and has not heard from a fourth. In this market, that is a pretty amazing record. I think the reason she received so many offers when others did not is because she studies Statistics. It seems like there are a lot more jobs available to engineers, but there are also a lot more people chasing those jobs. For each job that requires a statistician, there are way fewer people with the skills to do the work.
The other thing is that NCSU uniquely trains their Statistics majors in the use of commonly used industry tools. For example, Kelly has a class that teaches her how to perform statistical programming. The programming environment they use is SAS which is expensive enough that individual students cannot afford to it. The reason it is available to NCSU is that SAS started at NCSU and still has a close affiliation with the school. At they end of the class, she should have learned everything necessary to get her first SAS certification. The class even offers them the opportunity to take the certification test at a discount rate. The students use SAS and R, normal industry tools, to do their homework in other classes, too. The expectation is that the students will be able to walk into a new job and contribute the first day.
An ancillary benefit to the SAS training is the ability to talk about the use of these tools effectively in an interview. I think this was huge in her last interview with one of the research labs at Johns Hopkins. Kelly could explain in detail how she would accomplish specific tasks such as data cleaning and analysis.