About My Data+ Experience
“Data+ gave me an opportunity to apply some of the methods and skills that I’ve learned in the first year of my Master’s program to an interesting and very relevant project. It can be hard to see the “real-world” value of concepts learned in school, even in an applied field like statistics; through Data+, I was able to run MCMC sampling, learn how to use QGIS to manipulate spatial data, and improve my knowledge of (mostly) Python and (a little) R. I learned not just how to answer questions, but also how to ask questions.
I’ve definitely gained a better understanding of academic research. A lot of our work this summer was figuring out what the right questions were to ask – that was almost as hard as doing the actual work to answer them. This project was also very interdisciplinary (as I imagine others were) so it involved bringing in experts in political science and law to aide us in how to approach our analysis.”
