While telling someone at a party that you are a statistics professor may have once been met with a bored look, statistics is increasingly the hot new discipline. Graduates from Stanford’s graduate statistics programs are receiving offers in the range of $130,000 to $150,000 from the likes of Facebook to help companies makes sense of the torrent of data emerging from the internet. Can you build an algorithm that determines what is and isn’t spam? The value of statistics and data analytics will have a big place to play on the smartgrid where the volume of smart meter data could soon exceed the total data trafficked on AT&T’s entire network. The companies that are able to extract useful information from that data will find themselves in high demand.