Doing my MSc course at the University of Sheffield was an unforgettable experience

When I was a senior high school student, I preferred to spend more time studying maths - the interesting theories and the logical processes of proof were just like magic to me, showing me the beauty of maths. Moreover, I liked to examine figures to discover the information deep behind them. So I chose Statistics, one of the branches of mathematics, as my undergraduate major at Shandong University.

After finishing my BSc degree, I made up my mind to go on to further study my major abroad, since I believed that Statistics has developed more overseas. I decided to take my MSc Statistics course at the University of Sheffield, mainly because the content of the statistics courses in the School of Mathematics and Statistics were what I wanted to learn.

I wanted to improve my professional skills: so not just the theoretical knowledge that I needed to be taught, but the opportunity to complete practical experiments, to test whether the knowledge I had learnt could be used collectively.

The unforgettable part of studying in this department was that there were a great number of projects to be done. Some of them, we were required to finish independently, while some of them, we were asked to finish in groups.

I still remember the first time when all of the group members discussed the questions on Skype, I was too shy to join in their conversation because I lacked self-confidence in my spoken language abilities.

Yue Cai

Statistics MSc

The individual projects were a little bit easier for me, since no matter how hard the projects were, when I spent enough time thinking deeply about them, I could figure them out. However, for the group assignments, the most difficult thing for me was the communication with my group members.

I still remember the first time when all of the group members discussed the questions on Skype, I was too shy to join in their conversation because I lacked self-confidence in my spoken language abilities. I was afraid that my partners would not understand what I meant.

I knew I needed to overcome this obstacle, to let others know what I was thinking about the project. Here, I was very grateful to the supervisors who arranged the membership of the groups. In each group project, I had different group partners from different nationalities, which urged me to communicate with them in English frequently.

Moreover, some of the group members were very kind: they slowed down their speed when talking with me and encouraged me to speak as much as I could.

The lecturers in each course were all professional and responsible, and they were happy to answer any related questions after lectures or during their office hours.

Yue Cai

Statistics MSc

Finally, in these cooperative tasks, I could express my thoughts and join the problem solving process. These kinds of experiences not only gave us opportunities to use our professional skills, but also improved our team working and communication.

The lecturers in each course were all professional and responsible, and they were happy to answer any related questions after lectures or during their office hours. The content of the lectures was useful, so they gave me more power to understand the knowledge that had been introduced, especially for multivariate data analysis and the computational inference. Since I plan to carry on working in big data analysis or a data-mining related job, I had more interests in studying these two topics.

I really appreciate the lecturers, classmates and staff in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield. They not only provided me with lots of knowledge and resources, but were warm and helpful too.

For me, doing my MSc course at the University of Sheffield was an unforgettable experience.