Some Cal Poly seniors wish they didn’t have to count down the days to graduation; for seniors in the statistics department, that can now be a problem for next year.
On Sept. 23, 2023, the Cal Poly statistics department’s first ever graduate classes began. This year’s graduating class — a cohort of nine students –– will be Cal Poly’s first class to graduate with a Master’s of Science (MS) in Statistics.
This graduating class all received their Bachelor’s degrees from Cal Poly.
These students are members of the statistics blended program, according to MS Statistics Program Coordinator, John Walker. Cal Poly blended programs allow students to begin graduate classes in their major as an undergraduate student. Students can apply during their sophomore or junior year to begin graduate courses as a junior or a senior. Once blended students finish their undergraduate degree, they are enrolled as graduate students and spend an extra year in San Luis Obispo to complete their master’s.
Students who get accepted to the program pay tuition on a quarterly basis and may leave if they feel the need to. Every college at Cal Poly, except for the Orfalea College of Business, offers blended programs. Information about them is available on the Cal Poly Graduate Education website.
Some students join blended programs because they are only one year, making them less expensive than traditional two-year graduate programs. Blended programs are also an option for students who want to continue their education with the same faculty members.
“For me there [was an] underlying trust factor there with the statistics department,” statistics graduate student Katherine Chan said. “I know that we have a really good department, and [I] like [the] relationships that I’ve had with my professors.”
Some students also find the transition from undergraduate studies to graduate studies easier when they stay in one place.
“I think there’s this idea that graduate school has to be this big, scary thing and it’s only for the people who are really into it,” statistics graduate student Sean Ladder said. “I think that it feels more like, maybe this is part of the blended program, but it feels more like a continuation of undergrad.”
For the statistics program, continuing students fill out an application in the form of a Canvas quiz explaining why they want to become blended students, according to Chan. Students can get connected to the Canvas page by filling out this form or by talking to Walker or fellow MS statistics program coordinator, Kelly Bodwin.
According to Walker, there has been an increased demand for Cal Poly to offer an MS in statistics.
“Every program does a self study every few years where you [meet with] people from outside of Cal Poly, who are experts in whatever field,” Walker said. “We had these reviewers say we think you’d do an excellent graduate program. So we’d like to encourage you to pursue a graduate program for your students.”
The creation of this program has been a six-year process; faculty in the Statistics Department first got this project approved by the California State University Chancellor’s Office in 2017 but had to put it on hold in 2020 due to COVID.
To create this program, material needed to be added to existing 400-level courses to turn them into 500-level courses, and a thesis advising course needed to be created.
As to why there is an increased demand for MS programs in statistics, the Dean of Graduate Education, Amanda Lathrop, attributes that to the public’s increased, “interest around data science and analytics.”
This graduate program is a fully-immersive statistics program and does not focus on data science.
“There is a lot of data science, there is overlap there,” Bodwin said. “but students who know they want to do data science programming might be better served by a data science program or by the Business Analytics Master’s here.”
Creating this blended program has the potential to help students further their careers.
“Cal Poly is a little less known outside of California,” Bodwin said. “So we hoped that if we could offer students this extra year, that might help them get into more competitive PhD programs that I think they deserve elsewhere.”
Members of the statistics department said they do not want to detract Cal Poly students from applying to different Master’s programs.
Some students are looking for, “a change of pace, or they want to see what they can learn from a different group of people,” Walker said.
For Ladder, staying at Cal Poly has been a beneficial experience.
“It’s just one extra year for most people,” Ladder said. “And so if you could just do the blended [program], you have a master’s degree. I couldn’t recommend it enough.”