Investment immigration to the United States for university studies—which schools are you planning to apply to? Let us talk about those fascinating United States science and engineering schools!
In the United States, people use the word “sexy” to describe certain professions, generally implying that those who work in these fields possess highly scarce skills and are in short supply in the market. For example, what was the sexiest profession in the 90s? Computer engineers. The next decade? Statisticians! Therefore, for students who are still choosing their majors and planning their careers, it is important to grasp what is “sexy.”
Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian was the first to propose that the statistician is the “sexiest” profession of the next decade, because when faced with the cheapest and most ubiquitous thing in the future market—data—they possess the most scarce and valuable ability: the ability to use, analyze, and make numbers speak. Subsequently, American statistician Nate Silver made “statistician” and “big data” the hottest topics in recent years by accurately predicting the voting results in each U.S. state for both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. The Harvard Business Review simply declared that data scientist is the “sexiest job of the 21st century”: computers and the internet have brought us the wave of big data, and statisticians are our sailors. A large number of companies, represented by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Alibaba, eBay, LinkedIn, and Twitter, are sparing no expense in high salaries to find their best sailors. In 2014, the starting salary for U.S. undergraduate graduates in statistics was approximately 72,000 USD, while the starting salary for statistics Ph.D. graduates was as high as 120,000 USD.
If you ask which schools are the best for mathematics and statistics?
Regarding where companies should look for these “sexiest” talents, the first suggestion from the Harvard Business Review is to go to those established, prestigious statistics schools, starting with North Carolina State University. Also on the list are the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, and the University of Texas at Austin.
The Department of Statistics under the College of Sciences at North Carolina State University is one of the oldest and largest in the United States. The world's largest private software company and a leader in big data analytics, SAS Institute, was also born here. As one of the world's best employers as rated by Fortune magazine, second only to Google, SAS has long been a partner of the North Carolina State University Department of Statistics, providing graduates with internship and trainee opportunities. The North Carolina State University Department of Statistics is also a major founder of the U.S. “National Institute of Statistical Sciences” and the “Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute,” both of which are located in Raleigh, where North Carolina State University is based.
Scientists have always been sexy
The current popularity of statisticians can be compared to the Wall Street elite of the 80s and 90s, but if we look closely, they are actually the same type of people! In the 80s and 90s, university graduates with backgrounds in physics and mathematics joined investment banks and hedge funds to design brand-new algorithms and data strategies for the financial industry, and were known as Wall Street “quants.” Later, American universities successively opened sub-majors such as “financial mathematics” and “financial engineering” to better meet the financial industry's thirst for professional mathematical and scientific talent. Today, these talents with professional scientific literacy and superb computational and analytical skills are gathering from fields such as statistics, mathematics, physics, and biological sciences to become the trendsetters of the big data era.
