(Note: This is first in a three part series about graduate life in statistics. For links to all articles in the series, click here).

Here are some key points to consider when choosing graduate programs in statistics and biostatistics.

1. What’s the difference between biostatistics & statistics?

When I first applied for masters programs in statistics, I had little to no idea what biostatistics was. To the untrained eye – in my case, a liberal arts undergraduate student – the subject biostatistics gave off a connotation aligned with phylums and petri dishes, things I had been hoping to avoid since roughly 10th grade.

Ironically, however, biostatistics is not the intersection of statistics and biology; instead, biostatistics is mostly just statistics applied to fields within or related to public health. In four years of a biostatistics program, for example, I didn’t take a single biology course…