BELIZE CITY, Fri. Nov. 9, 2018– Yesterday, Thursday, November 8, the University of Belize (UB) launched two new programs at the Radisson Fort George Hotel and Marina. The first is a Bachelor in Statistics program, and the second is a certificate program in Geographic Information System (GIS).

The Statistics program is a 4-year program and it was formulated after UB reviewed their    curriculum, specifically their Math program, and noted that there is a need for coursework in statistics. According to Julianne Pasos, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at UB, in an interview with 7News, the program encompasses economic statistics, and demographic statistics, along with other statistics courses that were developed in partnership with the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB).

With regards to the GIS certificate, Pasos said, “It has so many implementation avenues. You can implement it in environments, you can implement in any area; mapping is a big thing. Now in developing this program what we were looking for is to do training, so that it becomes more known in the country and we said people don’t want to come and invest a long time to do this, so we said a 1-year program.”

Pasos added that for both programs, they are looking for persons to enroll who are already involved in professional endeavours involving statistics, so they will offer the programs as night and evening programs.

UB also hopes that the programs, which appear to be new areas of study in the region, would attract the enrollment of students from other Caribbean countries, and even international students.