Online Stats Course

[Anglory]

I know there are numerous threads about online courses for premed. But my situation is I want to take a stats class online this summer because I'll be doing research at UCSF, and I don't want to spend all my time there without doing anything else, so I figured I could slip in some units. I want as many schools as possibilities to apply to as possible, so I want to get that stats requirement/recommendation out of the way.

My situation is, although I know online courses may be frowned upon:
1) It's not a science class, or even an "important" requirement like calc, chem, etc.
2) The online class will be at my undergrad school, Berkeley. The finals and everything will be administered on campus.

Should I just take the stats class in a later semester, or is summer ok? Furthermore, the summer class is
Intro to Statistics and Probability for Business/Econ majors. It's still general/intro stats, but it should be okay right? Thanks!

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[hopefuldoc97239]

it sounds like you are genuinely interested in statistics, or at least interested in learning them well enough to put them to use doing research the research that you are interested in.

if that's the case, i'd caution you about taking it online. i'm sure there will be people on here who will disagree, but i'm just giving you my opinion. in my opinion, online courses are usually run by schools to maximize profit with fairly poor quality control.

regardless of where you take the course (online vs. in person) i'd also recommend that you consider taking a "statistics for behavioral science" course, or one that is taught by a psychology department. not every university will allow a psychology department to duplicate a course that is also taught by the math department, but many will. doing an online search i found that the Harvard online program has a course that looks like it's taught by their statistics department, but is titled "Introduction to Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences," which is more like what i'm talking about.

from my own personal experience and what i've observed at many colleges, intro stats courses from a math department tend to be overly tedious in teaching theory and in the first term usually don't progress to really useful tests used by actual biomedical scientists. if you take it from a psychology department you're more likely to get into more useful statistical procedures, like t-tests, correlation, ANOVA, and chi-square... things that are used in lots of basic science applications.

another possibility is that you might be able to find an introduction to statistics for epidemiology, which if it is useful would include things like sensitivity, specificity, number needed to treat, predictive value, odds ratios, likelihood ratios... stuff that is used extensively in medicine (but not always as applicable in basic science).

in case you feel awkward taking a stats course from a psychology department, i'd just point out that many statistics were developed by psychologists or by mathematicians interested in psychological questions. for example, factor analysis, now used in all sorts of applications, was largely developed to measure intelligence.