The third call for applications for new universities in the EU Member States, EFTA and EU candidate countries to join the European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS) is now published and closes on 30 June 2018.

EMOS builds on nationally accredited Master programmes which deliver upon the EMOS learning outcomes to familiarise the graduates with the system of official statistics, production models, statistical methods and dissemination. The programmes also collaborate actively with the National Statistical Institutes or other producers of official statistics for relevant master thesis topics and internships in the sphere of official statistics.

The third call of applications emphasises the importance of addressing the rapidly changing landscape from design based production of official statistics to integrating different kinds of data sources. Universities wishing to join the 23 already EMOS labelled Master programmes in 15 countries may submit by 30 June 2018 their applications complete with accompanying documents as described in the EMOS call text, guide for applicants and application form available at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/emos_en.

Contact: estat-emos@ec.europa.eu

The European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS) was launched by Eurostat and the European Statistical System (ESS) in 2014 to connect producers of official statistics and academia at European level. As a joint project of universities and data producers, EMOS aims at including official statistics in statistical curricula, meeting training and recruitment needs in the ESS and constituting a future recruitment pool of highly educated professional statisticians for the ESS and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB).

EMOS is a label awarded by the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC) for four years, renewable upon continued fulfilment of EMOS requirements. Partners in the EMOS network benefit from each other’s experiences and can develop deeper cooperation, e.g. joint degrees or exchange of students. Study visits to Eurostat are considered attractive by the students and EMOS summers schools and webinars offer a relevant mix of skills and knowledge for tomorrow’s official statisticians.

University of Linz – Statistics Austria

Six-weeks-wonder-woman: our first EMOS intern in Statistics Austria

Summary

The Master programme “Statistics” at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics and Business of the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) collaborates with Statistics Austria. An EMOS student from Linz arrived as a trainee to Statistics Austria while her counsellor was out of office for a longer period. But what the counsellor found on her return was in her own words “an enthusiastic and dedicated young woman already sat in my room, busily coding, calculating and proofreading. From time to time she raised her head from her computer to ask for clarifications or – even more often – for new work.“ In a few weeks the trainee did a lot of good work with “How is Austria?” indicators. Colleagues in Statistics Austria felt that while supervising the trainee took some time, it was also very rewarding and the trainee truly helped to improve some of their statistical processes

Story in detail:

Statistics Austria cooperates with University Linz who didn`t have too many Master’s students and as they only started with their EMOs programme recently, we didn`t expect to have an EMOS intern that soon. So lots of administrative and financial things had to be organized, before N. arrived and as we were pretty busy with those (and had lots of other things to do) we did not prepare a lot work for our soon to arrive intern N. All we knew was, that she just finished her Bachelor, was not sure about her Master’s topic and seemed to be a good student. And so Alex (head of the methodology department) and I (researcher in the analysis department) decided to give her a few different tasks, which had to be done in our projects anyway to provide her with some insights into our daily work.

Then I went off for a conference and holidays and when I came back a congenial, enthusiastic and dedicated young woman already sat in my room, busily coding, calculating and proofreading. From time to time she raised her head from her computer to ask for clarifications or – even more often- for new work.

We once had an intern from the mathematical field- he was communicating with us through code (SPSS syntax) and mathematical formulas. Not so N.: she was truly interested also in the topics of our work, had some very good advice how to improve our reports and graphs and even did some literature research on her own to get new ideas how to improve our models. And she was neither shy nor afraid to tell us, what she would do differently and what would be the best statistical procedure to use in her opinion. So yes, those 6 weeks were quite challenging for me (especially as I´m not a statistician by training) but they were also very efficient because even though I had to spend some time on supervising her work, N. did so much work for us, that she really was of great help for us.

Soon I started to ask different colleagues with interesting projects to meet us for dinner and as they realized that she was quite good, they started to involve her in their projects (with our permission, of course) or promoted their topics as potential topics for an Masters theses. As one colleague seemed to have been pretty successful in this we eagerly await her back in a year! There`s only one bad thing: future EMOS interns are going to be measured by a high standard.

University of Pisa – Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT)

Why EMOS is an added value?

Summary

The Master Program in Economics with curriculum in Official Statistics in Pisa offers an advanced training in economics supported by quantitative and statistical tools. Lisa is on her second year of the EMOS programme. While learning the traditional and new survey techniques, her favourite courses tackle challenges related to producing official statistics from big data, including modelling and learning to use the R  software. Seminars, intensive lectures and contact to other international students makes studying fun and an internship in the Italian national Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) will help her to finalise her Master thesis.

Story in detail

My name is Lisa, I am an Italian student and I am attending the second year of Master of Science in Economics curriculum in Official Statistics (EMOS program) at University of Pisa. In the second year there are many courses about EMOS programme that I can attend. One of my favourite course is European Local Indicators of Poverty and Living Conditions which it tackles the most important topics in big data ranging from data collection, analysis and visualization, as well as applications of statistical models to Big data. In this course, my classmates and I, we are learning traditional and new survey techniques and what might be the problems that arise in the definition and measure of local indicators of poverty and living conditions. I love it because the professor teaches us also the use of R software and at the end of the course she will give us some data to manage with this software and we have to expose in group to her our work. She also organizes many seminars and intensive lectures with professor from other EU countries.

Another added value of EMOS program is that there are many international student which attend its courses, in this way my Italian classmate and I we know and learn from other culture. I am grateful to participate to this programme also because thanks to this I have the opportunity to do an internship at ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica). At ISTAT I can formalise my thesis project. I am looking forward to do this internship because I can get in touch with real data and learn the use of new software to manage the latest.