(Note: This is the fourth and final part in a series about graduate life in statistics, co-written by Mike and Greg. For links to all articles in the series, click here).

There are a lot of things you don’t learn in graduate school that you probably should have.

Here’s our perspective, using our programs (Mike @ Brown + UMass, Greg @ UConn and WPI) and the experiences of our peers in other programs as baselines.

1. Data science

Not many statistics programs cover this kind of thing in their curriculum, but It’s a pretty important skill.  In our view, in modern statistics, if you can’t collect or organize data you’re essentially useless.  In the “real world”, no one (or very rarely) is someone going to give you a rectangular data file with no missing data and say “Analyze this.”

As a result, two elements of data…