Teaching

Since the beginning of my undergraduate program I have acted in educational roles, from professional and volunteer math tutor, to supplemental instructor, to teaching assistant, to now teaching fellow. Though admittedly I am a little biased, I believe statistical literacy is very important for the scientific community and broader society. This then leads to an interesting problem: if most people who use statistics won’t be statisticians, how do we teach statistics in an effective way to those people?

One answer to this question is to have individual projects on real-world problems, that way students not only learn how to perform the statistical analysis, but why those methods are useful and necessary. I have had the pleasure to be a teaching assistant and fellow for the STAT 1223 course at the University of Pittsburgh that does just that, and through it have seen many undergrads vastly improve in their statistical abilities.