While it is generally well known that the college electives students take round out their academic experience and create opportunities to better stand out to potential employers in a sea of applicants, experts say that enrolling in statistics and psychology courses can give any student’s resume a boost.

“One of the major skills that employers look for is problem-solving,” said David Durham, the director of the Career Services Center at West Virginia University.

“I think problem-solving is something tangible, something physical, something measureable, and a good foundation in statistics would be very valuable. On the other side of the coin, problem-solving with something involving human behavior—I think psychology would be very beneficial.”

Statistics can be applied to any field, said Michael Mays, chair of the statistics department and Eberly Professor for Outstanding Teaching.

“Any field has use for quantitative information. If you’ve got numbers coming in that are relative to the field, then it helps to be able to make sense of the numbers,” Mays said.

“What statistics does is it gives you a way take an unwieldy set of data and pick features out of that set that help you understand what’s going on.”

Mays recommends that all students take Statistics 111, which is a general introduction to statistics. In that course students learn how to read charts, understand claims about data sets and tell the difference between true and false sets of numbers.

Understanding human behavior is also a very important skill. Not only can a background in psychology help predict people’s reactions, but it can also help jobseekers to “sell” themselves as the best person for job prospects.

“Most fields require that people interact with each other,” said Kevin Larkin, professor and chair of the department of psychology. “To have some knowledge about behavior and the principles of behavior would be advantageous to people functioning well in those particular environments.”

Psychology 101 is the most popular psychology offered at WVU. Around 5,000 students take this course a year, Larkin said. The course offers a broad coverage of all the different parts of psychology, and is a good starting point for students.

Other courses he listed as beneficial to students include Psychology 241, Intro to Human Development; and Psychology 251, Intro to Social Psychology.

“Think about teaching, think about any health profession, think about any business where you’re going to have to sell something to someone, it’s all about interacting with other human beings,” said Larkin.

Understanding human development can help you to understand the different psychological, physical and behavioral changes than can occur during a person’s life, Larkin said. Social psychology, which is another popular course, would be especially beneficial to anyone that will eventually work with big groups of people.

“There are certain things that will turn people off or turn people on in terms of making you a viable candidate for a job,” Larkin said. “The way you position yourself, how you dress, those are important things. The first impression that you make, that kind of thing is kind of the hallmark for communications as well as social psychology.”

-WVU-

as/07/09/2015

CONTACT: Devon Copeland, Director of Marketing and Communication, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia University, 304-293-6867, Devon.Copeland@mail.wvu.edu

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