Statistics and Data Science Experience

The Statistics and Data Science Experience assignment consists of two parts:

  1. Having the experience
  2. Reflect on the experience

The assignment is due on Monday, 12/01 at 11:59pm to Canvas.

Experience

Below lists opportunities that count toward having a Statistics or Data Science experience. Note that the list is dynamic and new opportunities may arise as the semester progresses.

  1. Have a minimum 20-minute conversation with a statistician or data scientist and learn about their work.
    • Middlebury has several professors who consider themselves a statistician and/or data scientist. You might reach out to one and invite them to eat lunch with you in the dining hall!
    • Professors who are aware of this assignment and who you could contact include (but are not limited to):
      • Math/Stats: Professors Becky Tang, Meaghan Winder, Emily Malcolm-White, Alex Lyford, and Christian Stratton
        • Here’s a sheet to sign-up for lunch with Prof. Tang
      • Computer Science: Professor Phil Chodrow
    • For this opportunity, a maximum of two students may attend the same conversation.
  2. Attend one of the events below (for at least 30 minutes).
    • 10/03: Fall Faculty Forum talks by our Stats Faculty at 1:15pm in Axinn 229
    • 11/08: Women in Data Science Conference at Middlebury
  3. Tidy Tuesday

    • Tuesdays 11/4, 11/11, and 11/18 from 3:30-5:00 in MBH 169 (Q-Center Classroom)

    • TidyTuesday is an opensource project where people around the globe play with a dataset. These sessions are a weekly chance to practice working with data. Middlebury’s TidyTuesdays will be led by Jonathan Cummings, a biologist highly experienced with coding and analytics, who regularly works in R.

    • Attend one Tidy Tuesday and take a screenshot of your final product to include in your reflection!

Reflect

After having your experience, please create a brief set of slides (e.g. PowerPoint or Google Presentations) that contain the following content:

  1. Title slide that includes the name of the experience and your name
  2. Description of the experience
  3. Something(s) you learned from the experience (3-5 sentences/bullet points)
  4. Connection to STAT 201 (3-5 sentences/bullet points)
  5. If you attended an event/talk: a photo/screenshot of the experience with a descriptive caption. Please obtain consent from all people in the photo to share the photo with Prof. Tang and if possible, a public-facing website or bulletin board. If someone does not agree to share the photo with the public, please note that in the slide!

The slides should be well-designed and have large enough font for presenting to an audience.