Dear Student:

I'm pleased you are considering our graduate program. Statistics is a wonderful field to be entering: it is great intellectual fun, providing both a formal structure for understanding uncertainty and an opportunity to collaborate in a variety of scientific and technological endeavors. Furthermore, our graduates remain in high demand.

At Carnegie Mellon, we feel that all students should (i) obtain a mastery of basic theory, (ii) develop skills to identify, compute, and interpret interesting summaries of data, and (iii) gain experience in interacting with quantitative researchers who have statistical problems they wish to solve. At the Master's degree level our curriculum prepares students to take employment in which they might analyze data, design experiments, model random phenomena, and serve as a consultant, as well as giving them an understanding of the power and limitations of the tools they learn to use. Our Ph.D. curriculum offers comprehensive training in theory, applied statistics, computational methods, and cross-disciplinary research; it prepares graduates for research careers in universities, industry, or government.

The Department's reputation is based primarily on the research conducted here, by faculty and students, in statistical theory and methodology, our strong commitment to cross-disciplinary work, our emphasis on computing in both research and education, and the substantial involvement of our faculty in governmental, professional, and editorial work. One indication of its leadership is the Department's substantial presence on editorial boards of major professional journals. Editorships of the Journal of the American Statistical Association have been held on three occasions by members of our faculty, and Statistical Science, Chance, and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics were founded by our faculty members. Currently, faculty members here serve on the editorial boards of journals as diverse as the Annals of Statistics, Biometrics, Biometrika, Communications in Statistics, Data and Statistics, Econometric Theory, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Informatica, Istatistik, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Official Statistics, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Philosophia Mathematica, Real-Time Systems, Statistical Science, and Statistics in Medicine.

There are three features of our program that I want to stress. First, the Department is organized so that students receive a lot of individual attention. All graduate students have daily contact with faculty members; graduate student offices are interspersed among the faculty offices which ensures constant interaction. We have roughly 45 masters and Ph.D. students combined and about 24 faculty members, so class sizes are quite small. As you will see as you look through this brochure, the faculty members are very talented and especially enthusiastic about working with students. Second, we create a harmonious, non-competitive learning environment for our students. Each student is treated as an individual, with his or her own special program. When we accept a student, we do so with the expectation that the student will complete his or her degree program successfully, and we work very hard to help the student achieve that goal.

The third distinctive feature is that the faculty believes that all well-educated statisticians not only must understand the role that theory plays in good statistical practice, but they must be well-trained in the use of statistics in real problems and in computing. We provide our students with many opportunities for research apprenticeships and experience with applications. In fact, we have recently established an Institute for Statistics and its Applications, which has as its mission to provide training in cross-disciplinary research and teaching. As far as computing is concerned, we have outstanding departmental facilities, which are for the exclusive use of our faculty, students, and staff. The main component is a large network of workstations, which are powerful computers that enable users to edit text, perform numerical calculations, and display graphical output in simultaneously running processes. All of our graduate students have easy and unlimited access to all of the computing facilities, and this helps prepare them for the computing challenges they will face in the future.

As you read through this brochure, I hope you will sense the excitement we have about the field of statistics and will begin to appreciate the outstanding group of faculty and students in our Department. You will, no doubt, have questions about our program. I encourage you to call Larry Wasserman, me or any other faculty member with your questions, and if possible, please come to visit us.

Robert E. Kass

Professor and Department Head

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