Posted Mar. 2/04
By Michelle Gallant
Carleton University’s statistics program is in a league of its own – and it looks like Ivy.
Comparative studies of world research output have placed Carleton on top – one of only two universities in the world that have high productivity in both probability and statistical research, putting Carleton in the company of the American Ivy League school, Cornell.
Rankings are established based on the number of papers published per faculty in 25 of the top international journals in the field. Professor John Rao, a world-renowned statistician, is just one example of the outstanding faculty at Carleton that has contributed to Carleton’s excellent reputation in the discipline.
This list of impressive achievements and the faculty’s high involvement in research is what brought statistics Ph.D. student, Zahra Montazeri to study at Carleton.
“There are good hands at Carleton to take care of students,” she says.
In addition, given Carleton’s prime location in the nation’s capital, students have a unique advantage if they wish to work for the federal government.
But while there are a large number of Carleton graduates working for Statistics Canada, there are numerous other fields a degree in statistics could lead to, says Professor Majid Mojirsheibani, Chair of the Statistics Program Committee. Students may be conducting data analysis for new prescriptions in the pharmaceutical field, risk analysis for the insurance industry, or working for Environment or Health Canada.
Although statistics programs across the country have increased dramatically over the past decade, Carleton’s Ph.D. program remains one of the oldest, and Carleton’s unique stochastics program (a specialized field of probability and statistics) also sets the school apart, says Mojirsheibani. “Students still take a number of statistics courses, but there are more probability courses and therefore the program is more theoretically oriented,” he remarks.
Needless to say, graduates of Carleton’s Bachelor of Mathematics are sure to find success, and be recognized as having graduated from one of the foremost universities in the field.
