Day 651 of 1000

When Kelly tells people she is a Statistics major, people often ask if it is possible to get a job with that degree.  Beside the tactlessness of the question we are amazed that people know so little about what is driving innovation in medicine, the internet, marketing, agriculture, sociology, psychology, and just about every other field imaginable.  Big money is invested to mine information from the mountains of data produced in clinical studies, internet commerce, engineering research, etc.  A deep knowledge of statistics is required to do this work.  Statisticians are in big demand.

What prompted this diatribe?  I have written about some of the demand for statistical knowledge in the past (see here and here), but another example showed up today in an article on ZDNet today.  Dell and Intel are building a “Big Data” innovation center in Singapore.  Who will man the center?  Statisticians!