Welcome to STA440!

Goal of the Course

The goal of STA 440 is to prepare you for work as a practicing statistician. Important skills required of practicing statisticians (in addition to having a great set of tools in the statistics toolbox!) include creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, the ability to identify needed new skills and to learn them with minimal direction, the ability to craft a statistical analysis plan to fit a scientific hypothesis or question, teamwork, and the ability to communicate to a variety of audiences (including other statisticians, experts in areas other than statistics, a supervisor at work, and the general public, among others).

Lectures will include some new material you may not have seen, as well as material that you have already seen but that is often poorly understood. My goal is for you to be as prepared as possible to tackle real-world problems. This means that questions of interest will typically not be framed in much stati68+stical detail – part of your job will be to figure out which tools to use to analyze the data.

Flexibility, work ethic, knowledge of statistical science, pragmatism, the ability to proceed with minimal direction, professionalism, communication skills, and the willingness to try new things are all strong predictors of success in STA 440 (as well as in the working world). Don’t worry if you haven’t mastered all of these – we’ll work on them in class!

Class Meetings

Zoom

MWF 10:15 - 11:30 (usually Mondays will be labs, but sometimes lab and lecture will be swapped)

Teaching team and office hours

Note: office hours may vary due to travel and other commitments. Revisions to office hours will be noted via e-mail and on my webpage.

Team member	Office hours	Location
Professor Amy Herring	Fridays 2-3pm Eastern Time	Zoom (see Sakai for link)
TA David Buch	Wednesdays 8-9pm Eastern Time	Zoom (see Sakai for link)
TA Graham Tierney	Mondays 12-1pm Eastern Time	Zoom (see Sakai for link)

Materials

You should have access to a laptop and bring it to every class, fully charged. Texts and readings will be assigned as needed. The instructor and TA’s will support computation in R and RStudio. Students are free to use any software they wish as long as reproducibility requirements are met (e.g., you could knit from R markdown).

Topics and Important Dates

STA 440 contains a mixture of short lecture, lab, and work sessions at the usual class and lab times. Frequent mini-assignments will be provided in class and lab to check mastery and identify areas for additional focus.

Note: this schedule is approximate and is likely to be modified as the course progresses. Lab sessions will be swapped with lectures due to course timing as needed. All course and lab sessions (10:15-11:30am MWF) will be recorded. Assignments are due at 10am ET unless otherwise specified.