A statistician is a mathematician who works in the field of statistics. Applied or theoretical statistics are two types of statistics that statisticians can specialize in. A statistician is needed in a variety of fields, from journalism to hard sciences to finance, and many people find it to be a lucrative career. A statistician frequently collaborates with a specialist in a different field to apply statistical knowledge to a problem in that other field. To predict outcomes, analyze existing data, or develop business models, statisticians may collaborate with medical researchers, financiers, insurance agencies, government officials, or environmentalists.
Approximately 20,000 people in the United States identify as statisticians, with nearly half of them working for the government in some capacity. Although statistics can be studied in an undergraduate program at a university, most professional statisticians have a Master’s degree, if not a PhD, in the field. A statistician’s salary can vary a lot, but it’s usually pretty good, and statistics is considered a professional white-collar field.
The position of statistician has existed for thousands of years, with ancient empires employing statisticians to keep track of things like population, taxes, and important commodities like cattle. A statistician can be called in whenever something needs to be quantified, modeled, or predicted. As the world becomes more quantitatively oriented, statisticians will become an increasingly important part of the workforce. In today’s world, a statistician will almost always rely on computers to help them better model things, crunch numbers quickly, and keep track of data.
Because numbers are so important to a country’s healthy functioning, governments tend to hire a lot of statisticians. Imports and exports must be tracked and crunched to understand our economic relationship with other countries; populations must be tracked and examined to identify trends in births, deaths, and aging; crime must be examined to identify underlying patterns that can help guide policy to reduce it; and unemployment numbers must be monitored to ensure a healthy functioning economy with as robust a work force as possible. A statistician will almost certainly play a significant role in any country.
Many fields in the private sector, particularly the medical field and many areas of industry, rely on statisticians. New innovations in medicine are fueled research and development, which relies on the ability to track populations and see how different drugs or techniques affect them. A statistician should be involved to help sort through the noise and find the real data, ensuring that these numbers have strong predictive power. Numbers are used in industry to guide product refinement as well as cleaning up things like distribution channels to keep costs low and efficiency high.