Statistics Major

Back to Majors, Minors & Academic Programs

About the Major

Statistics majors are exposed to concepts and tools for working with data and gain hands-on experience and critical thinking skills by designing, collecting, and analyzing that data. Students learn to articulate important aspects of statistical problem solving, apply statistical tools to real-world cases and develop statistical thinking skills.

Jobs in Statistics

• Actuary
• Biostatistician
• Data analyst
• Statistician
• Data Scientist

Past Elon Statistics Internships

• Elon University, Elon Center for Organizational Analytics
• GFA World
• Deloitte
• JP Morgan
• AbbVie

Related Majors

• Applied Mathematics
• Biology
• Data Analytics
• Economics
• Political Science
• Public Health Studies

Statistics major is already living the dream, on his way to becoming a baseball analyst

Growing up, Evan Wu longed to be a baseball player.

“But then I realized, ‘Oh, you’re really short, and you’re pretty good, but you’re not that good,’ ” Wu recounted, adding another laugh-tinged comment to his younger self: “‘You’re not going to be a baseball player.’”

And while he also loved poring over baseball stats — “For Christmas, I used to get baseball statistics books with just numbers in them that I’d read for fun” — he didn’t think a career as a baseball analyst was doable, either.

“I’d always just thought it was too hard to get into or too complex or required knowledge I didn’t have,” Wu said. “I had written it off the same way I had being a baseball player.”

Then he enrolled in Elon University.

People showed me it was a possible thing given my skill set and my life experience. I came to Elon and realized there was a way I could do it.

Just a few weeks into his freshman year, he discovered Elon’s Baseball Analytics Club. There he met peers who were just like him — baseball fanatics obsessed with studying every stat they could get their hands on and minds around.

“People showed me it was a possible thing given my skill set and my life experience,” Wu said. “I came to Elon and realized there was a way I could do it.”

Two and a half years later, Wu is already making significant strides toward becoming a professional baseball analyst. The junior, who expects to graduate from Elon University in 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts in statistics and minors in sports management and economics, is working with the university’s baseball team as its Director of Analytics — a role he earned from his work in the Baseball Analytics Club.

“I’m insanely excited,” he said just a few weeks into the job in February 2024. “It’s exactly what I want to do after I graduate, so to be able to a) have that experience to put on my resume, but b) … experience what I want to do (with my life) is amazing.”

Elon wasn’t always on Wu’s radar as a high school student. Growing up in Pasadena, California, and surrounded by the University of California school system, he knew the outstanding reputation of UC schools. But after touring a few of them, he didn’t think the environment was exactly right for him.

“I visited a bunch, and they were all cool, they were nice people, but it wasn’t personalized,” he said. “It felt like I was going to be a student at a university. It didn’t feel like I was going to be Evan; it didn’t feel like I was going to be a statistics student. It felt like I was going to be one of the masses.”

Then, during his tour of Elon, he heard about the small class sizes and the supportive professors. “Everything just seemed perfect,” Wu said.

Through his coursework at Elon, Wu has been given the tools that have helped him thrive in his extracurriculars, where he uses the statistical software R every day. In Statistics Modeling, he was taught in both the R and SAS software, both of which data scientists use to create analyses and visualizations. In Statistical Computing for Simulation and Theory, he was exposed to Shiny apps, where users can build interactive web apps from R. His lecturer in that class, Ryne VanKrevelen, is also a faculty leader in the Baseball Analytics Club and Wu’s research mentor.

He wasn’t even aware that Elon had an extracurricular club for baseball analytics before he made the decision to attend. That was just a happy bonus.

In the club, which meets weekly for about two hours, students look at relevant aspects of baseball from an analytical lens — “the stuff we’re all curious about,” he said. For example, in the fall of 2023, they decided to try to predict how much baseball player Shohei Ohtani would get signed for. Because Ohtani is both a pitcher and a hitter — almost unheard of in the game, particularly at his level — the club knew the unique player would sign a contract worth a unique amount of money.

They didn’t have the time nor the details to perform a massive simulation, so they decided to just logically break it down, taking into consideration what individual pitchers and hitters earn, Ohtani’s individual skills and the recent elbow surgery he underwent. The club got close in their prediction but misjudged how much the deep-pocketed Los Angeles Dodgers would offer ($700 million). In addition to Ohtani’s unique ability and performance, “They wanted his face, and we may have slightly underestimated how much his face was worth,” Wu said of the player’s many endorsement deals.

The club isn’t just a fun hobby (though it definitely is). It also can bring national exposure to students if they are chosen to compete in the Diamond Dollars Case Competition hosted at the SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) Analytics Conference, the top gathering of baseball analytics industry professionals. The event pits undergraduate, graduate and professional school students from universities across the country against one another, with participants preparing an analysis and presentation of a baseball operations decision. In 2022, Wu was the youngest in a team of five Elon club members who won their division.

His club performance is also what led to his work with Elon’s baseball team, which is giving him priceless experience that will hopefully help him attain his dream job as a baseball analyst for a Major League Baseball team.

In early 2024, the university invested in Trackman, a radar-based ball-tracking system that measures the numbers in a given baseball play — how fast the pitch was, how much it was spinning, how fast the ball was hit, where it was hit, etc. The only thing the system can’t determine is the call of the play — it doesn’t know if the umpire called it a strike, a ball, or an out. That’s where Wu and a few of his fellow club members come in: They are using the software and tagging each pitch, supplementing the data with whatever they see. In addition to the data collection, Wu is also working with analysis and visualization.

“The whole reason I picked statistics was to take data and translate it into English for people,” said Wu, who hopes to present the data in matter-of-fact recommendations for Elon’s baseball coaches to use to help improve player performance.

That right there is the beauty of statistics, Wu said: You can simplify complicated data and make it useful to professionals in almost every field — from medicine to, yes, baseball. His advice to incoming students is not to limit themselves.

“Every opportunity is worth at least attempting,” he said. “Don’t write yourself off.”

Curriculum & Degree Requirements

• Statistics A.B. (opens a new window)
• Statistics B.S. (opens a new window)