Most practical/useful statistics courses?

[jc14]

Hi guys,

I'm going to be attending a master's program this fall in Applied Statistics. This question is geared more towards graduated students who are working - but I was wondering, what are the most practical stats classes you have taken? 

I'm trying to decide which courses to take as my electives. My future goals are still up in the air - but I generally want to go into the quantitative research/data science direction. Some suggestions I have gotten:

 

-Bayesian Statistics: seems to be a consensus. Many people suggest taking multiple courses
-Time Series: this one has mixed opinions. Some say it's really only useful for those trying to work in finances? What do you guys think?
-Generalized Linear Models
-Exploratory Data Visualization
-Linear Models and Experimental Design
-Statistical Machine Learning

-Applied Data Science

-Data Mining
-Any others?

If you have experience working in a heavy data analyst job/big data job, I would love to hear what courses ended up being really useful. Thanks!
 

[StatsGuy92]

I don't have much experience on the job as I just finished my undergrad and I am starting a Gradutate program in Statistics (geared towards data mining/machine learning) as well in the Fall, but from my own research and reading through a lot of program's curriculums, I would say your list is pretty extensive and complete.

If I were to add anything to your list, it would be Natural Language Processing. Yes it is somewhat more related to computer science, but anyone who can handle statistical machine learning can definitly handle it. If you plan on going into industry, I've been told this course is one of the most useful in data science for many fields of applications. I am planning on taking this class during my second semester of the grad program.

Edited May 8, 2015 by StatsGuy92