You have chosen biology as your college major because you would like to be a medical doctor. However, you find that the probability of being accepted into medical school is about 10 percent. If you are accepted into medical school, then your starting salary when you graduate will be $300,000 per year. However, if you are not accepted, then you would choose to work in a zoo, where you will earn $40,000 per year. Without considering the additional educational years or the time value of money, what is your expected starting salary as well as the standard deviation of that starting salary?
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
You have chosen biology as your college major because you would like to be a medical doctor. However, you find that the probability of being accepted into medical school is about 10 percent. If you are accepted into medical school, then your starting salary when you graduate will be $300,000 per year. However, if you are not accepted, then you would choose to work in a zoo, where you will earn $40,000 per year. Without considering the additional educational years or the time value of money, what is your expected starting salary as well as the standard deviation of that starting salary?
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Given Information : You have chosen biology as your college major because you would like to be a medical doctor. However, you find that the probability of being accepted into medical school is about 10 percent. If you are accepted into medical school, then your starting salary when you graduate will be $300,000 per year. However, if you are not accepted, then you would choose to work in a zoo, where you will earn $40,000 per year.
Expected Return :
- Expected return is the income or profit expected by investor from their investment.
- Standard deviation is calculated by taking the difference of value and mean value of it.
- It is calculated as square root of variance.
Expected starting salary = 0.10*300,000 + 0.90*40,000 = $66,000
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