… by JoJo / from China / MSc Statistics and Operational Research / PG (2021-22)
This is the subject that I want to talk about for quite a long time. At the time I’m writing this blog, it is already the second semester of my MSc studying Statistics and OR. The first semester was certainly hard and super intense, but we managed to surpass the phase, and here I am, trying to pull a blog out telling you what is it like to change subject from a different disciplinary to statistics. I do appreciate that this post may not target at all the audience, but I believe it is useful for students who are from different discipline who wants to come to do statistics.
We have many students who did not come from a statistics or mathematics background, so for those of you who are unsure about whether you should apply because you are afraid that your background may not be good enough, do apply. As long as you can get an offer from the admission, you will be doing just fine.
I have seen quite a few people who used to do economics and decided to change subject and switch to statistics instead, myself too. And if I am perfectly honest, it felt extremely daunting before I got here, since I could not really get much information about the student experience on postgraduates who didn’t do a Maths BSc. Hence, I am trying to fill that information gap, and using this blog to hopefully provide more information on switching subject.
As a matter of fact, if you studied economics or something along the line of that, at least in the UK, you should be perfectly fine with 95% of the content that is being taught here. (Depending on your previous experiences and mathematics content of your undergraduate programme. Discrepancies do occur).
If you have studied linear regression and knows basic principals of statistics and probability, then you should be fine with the stats course in the first semester. And for people who didn’t have programming experiences, it is ok, but you might want to get started with R. The stats courses do offer a beginner programming course but it is quite fast paced. As for the operational research part of the course, some understanding of mathematical proofs is required. Even if proofs are not your strongest part, you should at least be ok with it, because if it is not something you like, then you might not enjoy the some of the OR course.
Now, hope that didn’t scare you off. Back to the subject, should I change subject and will it be too difficult for me to do so? The answer is you should change subject, as long as you are somewhat certain that it is something that you want to do for at least a full year, and secondly, will it be too difficult for you to pull it of? Depends. Say economics, if you have studied econometrics, mathematical economics and you are keen to learn maths, then Statistics and OR, Statistics with Data Science, or Operational Research are things you can certainly do without any big problems in terms of knowledge gap (in my opinion). But again, the base line is that as long as you are given an offer, don’t be afraid, you can study through the year, and although the first semester was especially tough (lots of deadlines and lots of study hours and high intensity), people can certainly ‘survive’ and they do. The payoff in the future would probably make everything that one can go through in this one year worthwhile I believe.