Stephanie H's Blog

I just got back from a meeting with a professor to try to put together a data analysis contract. In case you aren’t too familiar with contracts, a contract is basically a way to create your own class or do your own advanced research, working one-on-one with a faculty member or in a small group with a faculty member. A lot of upper-level students love contracts because they give you the freedom to study what you want at the level you wish to study it at.

This contract will be a data analysis contract– we’ll be taking sets of data and analyzing them, essentially. My current contract sponsor (professor) specializes in analyzing data for economics, but we’re thinking of bringing in guest lecturers and working with lots of different faculty if I can get together a diverse enough group. Because it’s just analyzing data, I can bring together a group of students who are interested in everything from environmental studies to clinical psychology. I know I want to do economics.

We talked for about forty-five minutes in his office and discussed the many statistics possibilities out there. I liked that he was really looking forward to bringing in new ideas and learning things from students, and he seemed to enjoy all sorts of subjects. I am to gather a group together and go from there. I’m pretty excited.

Today we came at a crossroads in Mathematical Systems– we had to choose what we wanted to study for winter quarter because our professor needed to start ordering textbooks soon. I personally wanted to stop real analysis and study probability, but the class had its vote and real analysis won by a landslide. So that’s what I’ll be studying in the winter– real analysis (the study of the real number line) and combinatorics.

This is what tends to happen mid-quarter– planning for the next. I’ll keep you posted.