Stanford Degrees in Statistics
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
In hindsight, I am glad that I studied math at Stanford (also I ended up doing something completely different: marketing). It pushed me to think deeply and patiently about a problem at length and taught me how to mix intuition with analytic rigor.
I believe it was Paul Graham who said that math was one of the better subjects to pursue in school because it's one of the most difficult. I kind of agree with pg on this one: I was nowhere near the top of my math classes, but whenever I took theoretical CS or stats classes, I found them shockingly easy and did well with much less effort.
I did find theory CS courses 'easy' as well, but I'm sure you'd consider straightforward some courses such as MATH230X that would be challenging for non-math majors.
[1] https://members.cur.org/members_online/members/directory_lis...
A very relevant read FWIW.
Surely any irresponsible use of time is a personal deficit, not a graduate curricula's.
From a complexity barrier perspective, consider a career in ASIC design.
From a market saturation perspective, consider a career in any discipline of psychology.
Let me rephrase and probably further restrict what i mean: - If you want to work in big four(which was my assumption from Big4+Unicorn piece), you are better of not doing PHD in terms of progress careerwise. here is the reasoning, using some numbers i have seen around: - Big 4 usually let's you start Level N straight out of school. If you do PHD, they let you start Level N+1. Master's doesn't change anything, you still start Level N. - Phd takes (approximately) 5 years. - Promotions take 1-2 years, depending on your ambitions, your manager etc. Assume 1.5 years. - With the above numbers, instead of 5 years in PHD and start at LN+1, you could easily get to LN+3. If you are ambitious, you could get at least one promo in 1 year, which would put you in 1 year into LN+3, making you close to LN+4.
In all these 5 years, you'll also be banking stock refreshers, people would get to know you well, you could build reputation, and you would have a good chunk of money in the bank.
If you are targeting starting your own company, depending on what it is, phd might help (taking phd topic and making a company out of it is common). However, I believe, you could do much more in those 5 years, and you wouldn't have to go through emotional ride of graduate school as an extra stress.
Again, it all depends on what you want with phd. if your goal is working for FANG, 5 years of your youth is worth more than a phd.
To check whether this the case for your situation, you can browse websites of current Stanford students if your target discipline and check whether they published anything before their first year of graduate school.
I ended up in marketing by chance: I am the 1st employee at the current startup and naturally evolved into that role because I am technical but not an engineer and like to write/say stuff.
Marketing, especially product marketing, is one of the most under-rated and under-recognized role in the startup world, but in many B2B businesses, it's just as important (or so I'd like to believe) as engineering and sales.
What are we looking here for someone that wants to learn all this while keeping a full-time job? 3 years?
I posted it but the heavy lifting was all /u/aormiston on /r/pystats:
> I just finished scraping all the required and optional readings (textbooks mainly) from nearly every Stanford undergraduate and graduate level stats course. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d_MNmIGY7yzrpnStnZqz... I only did the suggested courses for the Data Science track in the MS Stats program. Feel free to do the others and leave links in the comments if you like. This isn't exhaustive (some courses were harder to find than others), so this'll likely be a living document. Feel free to send me anything I've missed or better texts for any subject that I should add to the document. Also, for free technical textbooks, I've found freecomputerbooks.com to be very helpful (despite the fact that it sounds like clickbait). I'd recommend you check that out before shelling out for any of the textbooks listed.
> The Department requires that the student take 45 units of work from offerings in the Department of Statistics or from authorized courses in other departments. Of these 45 units, eight statistics courses from the list of required courses must be taken for a letter grade.
In general, unless you have something meaningful to add to the conversation, it's best to refrain from making comments (even if you're comment is a positive cordial one such as the one you posted).