Learning Stats at UofT: A Guide to Focuses in Applied Statistics

The fundamental statistics courses at UofT are normally unchanged, at least from my experience in the past three years. Still, I think it is worth devoting some blogs to this topic. Before starting the introduction to courses, I would like to spend some time on the programs offered by DoSS.

I am a student in Applied Statistics Specialist, or Method and Application, at UofT. Though there were some changes in the requirements, the main focus of the two programs is the same. In particular, you will go through some fundamentals in R and (Frequentist) statistics in your first two years, and take upper year courses in some advanced topics. Compared to the Theory one, you do not need to take so many courses in theory, but you need to choose a focus depending on your interest. The focus seemed less important, but I gave a lot of thoughts about it in my past years. So I would like to share some of them with you. Note that all of these can be found on the official website of Arts & Science, and I hope this paragraph serves well as an introduction.

Focus can be changed, but you have to plan ahead

The selection of focus really depends on the courses you take in your first year. Most students in MP take ECO101/102 and CSC148/165 in their first year. This courses combination of CS and ECO has certain benefits. Specifically, this combination gives students much flexibility in their second and third year since it allows them to choose Data Science Specialist in Statistics program, CS programs and Economics programs

However, a common solution is not necessarily good. As a student who would like to take new challenges and learn more about education, I chose to take Education courses in Victoria College. This to some extent limited my choices of programs. In particular, if I would like to enroll in other programs, I might need to start from the beginning. Nonetheless, I met great friends there and discovered that being a teacher in a primary/middle school was not what I really wanted.

Then I decided to select Astrophysics as my focus in my second year, hoping to explore the broader universe that I have never learnt before. It was fun to learn, but it was too theoretical and I started to get interested in Finance and Economics soon. Hence I reached a crossroads again. If I continued on Astrophysics, I believed I could still do well in academia, but I could not imagine what I was going to do after that. On the other hand, if I chose Economics, I needed to take first-year courses in Economics in my second year and caught up with others in my third year. This was exactly the disadvantage of my first-year course selection.

The key point is that there is going to be a trade-off when you want to select a focus - it is more common to stick to your first-year courses when you think about choosing a focus, but then you do not have the opportunity to choose some other interesting courses in the university.