Beyond the Classroom

In addition to specialized courses, the MSSP program offers students a variety of opportunities to enhance their learning beyond the classroom.

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Statistical Consulting

The MSSP program is intimately associated with the MSSP Consulting service, one of Boston University’s primary statistical consulting resources.  Students in the MSSP program, working closely under PhD student mentors and MSSP program faculty, help provide statistical consulting services in support of research across the university.  Serving on the order of 75+ clients per year, students in the program have the opportunity to encounter requests for statistical help that range from design of surveys and experiments, to advice on data summary and visualization, to sample size calculations for investigator grants, to large-scale analyses in randomized clinical trials.  Projects have been brought to us from a wide cross-section of the university community, with topic areas including art history, biomedicine, communications and journalism, education, engineering, marketing, rehabilitation and health sciences, and social work.  A number of the projects involve long-term collaborations, including a newly started collaboration with BU Athletics to engage in sports analytics.

Importantly, rather than simply producing narrowly-focused analyses, emphasis in consulting is placed on the entire process — asking the right questions, understanding the problem(s) of interest to the client/collaborator, data provenance, modeling and prediction, and presentations and reports.  Simply put, students gain direct and intensive experience with essentially the same type of holistic work process they can expect to encounter in most types of employment.  And our student interview experiences show that prospective employers understand and value this experience!

Statistics@Work

Interface with working professionals in a relaxed environment. Our Statistics@Work seminar series hosts multiple industry speakers each semester to expose students of all levels to how statistics is used in practice. Seminars include a presentation by each industry guest, aimed at highlighting how statistics is used to address needs in their particular domain, followed by an informal “meet-and-greet”, where students and speakers can chat over light food and drinks. Past speakers have included:

• Carlos Morales, Director, Global Portfolio Strategy, Liberty Mutual
• Alok Pattani, Quantitative Analyst, Google
• Marc L. Berger, Vice President, Real World Data and Analytics in the Global Health & Value Group, Pfizer Inc.
• Jason Xin, Principal Data Scientist, Optum Enterprise Analytics
• Clementine Plati, Data Scientist, TripAdvisor
• Xiaoyu Jiang, Associate Director, Biogen
• David Liu, Director of Data Science and Innovation, CVS Health
• Tom Foth, Senior Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC)
• Kate Donahue, Senior Data Scientist, Booz Allen Hamilton

Internships

While the program is designed to allow completion in as little as two semesters, many of our students choose to complete their coursework over three semesters, allowing for the option to pursue an internship during the summer semester. The training provided through the MSSP program affords our students the ability to work in a variety of fields including:

• Biomedicine
• Economics/Finance
• Marketing
• Online Media
• Consulting
• Insurance

Recent Internships

Click each picture to read more about our students’ internship experiences and their advice for current and prospective MSSP students.

	Anahita Bahri Spotify Data Scientist Intern
	Zichun Liu Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer/ Data Scientist Intern
	Ran Tao Wayfair Business Analyst Intern
	Jiayuan Shi Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research Biostatistician Intern
	Yuan Yuan A+E Networks Marketing and Research Intern