The Mathematical Sciences Department at UTEP offers a program of instruction and research leading to a Master's degree in the area of statistics.
The department has a history of successfully preparing students for doctoral studies in the mathematical sciences as well as for positions in industry. Graduate classes are small (5-8 students) and the standard of teaching is high; faculty compete for graduate class assignments. The entire faculty consists of seven Professors, thirteen Associate Professors, and seven Assistant Professors. Seventeen of the 27 faculty members have published research articles in refereed journals within the past three years and are designated "graduate" faculty; that is, eligible to teach in the graduate program.
The department has set aside several Teaching Assistantships for students enrolled full-time in the STAT program. Teaching Assistants are required to enroll in a minimum of 10 semester hours and are scheduled up to 20 hours/week of work in the department. The duties of a Teaching Assistant may include grading papers, assisting professors with lab teaching for statistics courses, and holding tutorial sessions for students.
The Department of Mathematical Sciences is conveniently located in Bell Hall, across the street from the campus library, a student cafeteria, and museum. Graduate student offices are intermingled with faculty offices. All of the offices are separate from classrooms creating an environment conducive to learning.
The department has its own computing resources in Bell Hall. There are Dell computers available to use in each of the graduate students' offices. Bell Hall houses the Statistical Consulting Laboratory (a core facility of the Border Biomedical Research Center (BBRC)), which is open to any student majoring in Statistics. The software available in the computer lab includes Microsoft Office, Minitab, Matlab, SAS, SPSS, SPlus, R and Mathematica.
The department is committed to diversifying the ethnicity, race, and gender of the nation's pool of mathematical scientists. All individuals are encouraged to apply and inquiries are welcome. For application/registration, please refer to On-line Application.
The degree program has a thesis and a non-thesis option. For students electing the thesis option, the program requires 24 hours of acceptable course work and 6 hours of credit for the thesis. For students not electing to write a thesis, 36 hours of acceptable coursework, including Mathematics 5396, are required. Students must enroll in Mathematics 5195 each semester of residence. Comprehensive written exams are required of all students. Students who write a thesis may have a portion of the comprehensive examination waived.
In either case at most 9 hours of upper division Undergraduate Courses (3300-4300 level) are acceptable. The particular course of study for each student must be approved by the departmental committee on graduate studies and by the Graduate School.
Entry into the program requires a minimum of nine hours of suitable upper dividion course work in mathematics and/or statistics. In addition, it is expected that the student possesses a good working knowledge of a high level computer language such as Matlab, Splus, R or SAS. Students with inadequate undergraduate preparation may be conditionally admitted and will be required to remove any deficiencies after entry into the program.
All students in the program will be expected to complete the following required Graduate Courses:
Math 4326 (Linear Algebra, undergraduate course)
Math 5321 (Principles of Analysis)
Stat 5380 and Stat 3581 (Mathematical Statistics)
Stat 5385 (Statistics in Research)
Stat 5388 (Multivariate Data Analysis)
Math 5396 (Graduate Research)
The remaining courses usally will be selected from
Math 5329 (Numerical Analysis)
Math 5330 (Computational Methods of Linear Algebra)
Stat 5384 (Linear Statistical Models)
Stat 5386 (Stochastic Processes)
Stat 5390 (Nonparametric Statistics)
Stat 5391 (Time Series Analysis)
Stat 5392 (Statistical Computing)
Each student's program will be designed individually to meet the student's interests and goals.
Faculty research occurs in the areas of theoretical and applied statistics. The program accomodates students desiring an applied background for a career in government and industry as well as students desiring a more theoretical background for further graduate studies.
For further information on STAT, please contact Dr. Joan Staniswalis, STAT Advisor at joan@math.utep.edu.
Updated 03/01/2007