Welcome to STA540!

Goal of the Course

One goal of STA 540 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).

Mini 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 statistical detail – part of your job will be to figure out which tools to use to analyze the data. You should expect to be working without a “play by play” guide.

Because of the nature of the course, we will encounter many more advanced topics that could easily be the subject of entire courses. For the benefit of those whose interest is piqued, I will post additional resources for further exploration. Part of the goal of this course is to learn how (and what!) to teach yourself in order to complete a project, but we’ll also delve more deeply into topics, time permitting.

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 540 (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 (asynchronous)

MTWThF (office hours with instructor or TA, some live lectures 2:00-3:15pm to be recorded)

Recordings will be placed on Sakai, arranged by date.

Teaching team and office hours

Note: office hours may vary. Revisions to office hours will be noted via announcements/e-mail.

Team member	Office hours	Location
Professor Amy Herring	Tuesday and Thursday, 3:15-4:00 EDT and by appointment	Zoom (see Sakai)
TA Raphaël Morsomme	Monday and Wednesday, 7:00-8:00pm EDT and by appointment	Zoom (see Sakai)

Materials

Texts and readings will be assigned as needed. We will support computation in R and RStudio.

Topics and Important Dates

STA 540 contain a mixture of short lecture, lab, and work sessions. Frequent smaller-scale assessments will be provided to check mastery and identify areas for additional focus. The schedule below lists deadlines for major assignments; the smaller-scale assessments will be assigned frequently (approximately every other day) with a tight turnaround to ensure no one falls behind.

Note: this schedule is approximate and is likely to be modified as the course progresses. Some sessions may be swapped due to course timing. Assignments are due by noon EDT unless otherwise specified.