to help students build careers in the analytics industry and pursue higher studies in classical and modern statistics the indian institute of technology iit kanpur has come up with two programmes a fouryear bachelor of science bs and a fiveyear dual degree bachelor of sciencemaster of science bsms programme in statistics and data science to be offered from 202122 session by its department of mathematics and statistics iit kanpur director abhay karandikar says that the opportunities in retail banking energy telecom agriculture health and egovernance sectors make it the right time for students to engage in the fieldsimilar to the other dual degree programmes students would be admitted through the jee advanced exam the bs students during the course of their programme will have an option to convert their programme to a 5year dual degree bsms programme wherein they will have the opportunity to do advanced courses in statistics and data science they would also be required to do 36 credits of thesis which would involve appliedtheoretical projects karandikar explains the institute is in the process of setting up the school of medical research and technology smrt that is expected to have a huge repository of data related to health research the students would be able to focus on solving realworld problems related to such data to boost research and analytics in this emerging area says karandikar they would be exposed to various other types of structured and unstructured data related to bioinformatics and digital health banking and financial data speech signal and image processing data seismological data to mention a few course details the department compulsory dc courses would lay the foundation of fundamental statistical and mathematical courses statistics and data science courses and computational courses students would have an option to do up to 36 credits of departmental elective de courses and 63 credits of open elective oe courses under the oe slots they can do relevant elective courses offered by the departments of computer science and engineering cse and electrical engineering ee karandikar explains he adds that a student who aspires to clear gate ugccsir net upsc and other competitive exams would receive the required training through these dc and de courses statistical component on the benefits of statistics in data science courses saurabh ghosh professor human genetics unit indian statistical institute kolkata says a combination of exploratory data analyses understanding of basic statistical theory and computations in statistics is ideally required by most firms that work on analytics including the financial and pharmaceutical sectors on the other hand state of the art research in social and biological sciences currently involve data analyses that require these statistical techniques hence inclusion of statistics in data science courses would enhance prospects in corporate as well as research careers bhupesh daheria trustee ceo aegis school of data science and cybersecurity emphasises that data science courses are all about making sense of the data and applying it to solve realworld problems across sectors in which statistics forms a mandatory part