They are required to pass three Preliminary exams. The third one is based on two of the methods courses listed above. Usually the student takes these exams after finishing the particular sequence of courses. Most of the course work as well as the dissertation will involve statistical computing. Our Sun Lab provides hardware and software for this work.
Students can have a cognate area .
Up to 15 hours in graduate quantitative courses can be included from another area. Recent students have had cognate areas in computer science, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. But many other areas such as business, psychology, etc. are possible. We advise Ph.D. students to select their own advisor from the statisticians in the Statistics Area. Theses can range from theoretical to applied and we encourage cross-disciplinary work.