Learning Stats at UofT #2: A Guide to Second-year Courses

This is the second post of the series Learning Stats at UofT. In case you did not read my last post, here is the introudction.

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.

STA237/238

There are three combinations of courses offered by DoSS. The first combination is STA237 and STA238. This combination primarily focuses on R. It also goes through the fundamentals of statistics. However, it may not be the best introductory courses for statistical theories because every year the focus is adjusted. The organization of the courses was not very satisfactory last year because students from RC without strong stats background found it too programming-based and students from CS found it less interesting because of lack of in-depth theories.

STA247/248

There is another combination called STA247 and STA248. This combination is designed solely for computer science students and it is great to learn if you want more knowledge in probability, especially because it involves many creative questions about probability and some knowledge that computer science students may need for programming,

STA257/261

The last combination, which is the combination I took in my second year, is STA257 and STA261. This combination is so-called the hardest one for second-year stats students. Typically, the instructor will introduce a bunch of distributions, some new concepts about CDF and PDF, and some calculations using double integration. Now this was the tricky part for me at that time. Many students didn’t learn convolution and double integration when they took this course. As a result, many of us needed to spend more time getting familiar with these things.

Another interesting aspect of this course is that it doesn’t involved too much about Bayesian. I would say this is not really a limitation, but it somehow affects how students think about statistics in the future. This course introduces many concepts that was thought to be important in the future, particularly the part about ordered statistics and quantile thing. They will play an important role in the third-year courses