The Department of Statistics offers a Master of Science (MS) degree in statistics and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in statistics. The MS degree has two options, one in applied statistics and the other in mathematical statistics. In both options, preparation of an MS thesis is optional. The thesis option requires a minimum of 27 semester hours of graduate credit exclusive of thesis and the non-thesis option requires a minimum of 33 semester hours. The PhD degree requires basic core course work equivalent to the mathematical statistics option of the MS degree plus work in advanced probability and inference, otherwise, the student can select advanced course work according to his own special interests. Graduate students in the department may expect to have assignments that include teaching, applied research and consulting experience in addition to their course work and the basic research experience involved in completing their dissertation. The department maintains over 160 PC's in a Novell environment, along with twenty Sun workstations connected to an Enterprise class Sun fileserver. Two student labs contain both PC's and Sun workstations. A four-processor Sun server dedicated to statistical computation provides resources for very large databases and complex analyses. Courses in advanced calculus and linear algebra are required as prerequisites for all graduate students in statistics.