I have worked in the phramaceutical industry for 15 years and can assure anyone with a PhD in biostatistics that their prospects for employment in industry are excellent+.
Academic positions are harder to get, doctorate or not. More recently, many universities have been freezing headcount or laying off, but that is another story. Understand that the essence of the degree is the ability to do productive research independently. Committment to the mathematical sciences is essential. In fact, the most successful biostatisticians that I have worked with have all majored in math or a science as undergraduates. I'm sure there are exceptions here and there, but they all passed their qualifier exams in mathematical statistics and probability; so mathematics was the path. Have no illusion about that. Epidemiology is closer to the biological and medical sciences. It depends on whether they do modeling of the disease process -whch can take one quite far into stochastic processes, or study its more qualitative aspects, which is what an MD might do. Yes, we biostatisticians work on "other people's projects", usually ones sponsored by our employer and designed and lead by a research scientists. However, we also do our own reseach if we have the time (and interest) to do it. Mental health is no different than any other area as it is subject to the same laws of experimental design and the correspnding statistical analysis. Of course there is a large amount of work being done in the pharmaceutical area for mental health. But, psychologists also do quite a bit of statistics and related modeling. You may want to look through the research liteature in the area of biostatistics (Biometrika, Biometrics, Statistics In Medicine) or the Journal or Epidemi-ology to get a sample of what some workers in these areas do. Also see Psychometrika. Sorry about the field of mental health, I'm not familiar with their lit. One final point. In many cases, biostatistics is a job-title that is held by statisticians, epidemiologists, mathematical biologists, and even a few born-again physicists and mathematicians. Hope this helps ! Al __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/ . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
