I have a lot of goals when it comes to my Kenan Fellows Internship, but if I were to boil them all down they could fit into these three main goals:
- Learn how to code in Octave.
- Acquire an understanding of SAMSI day to day work.
- Create a project that has real world applications and community involvement.
1. Being able to code is an extremely useful skill and I want to be able to show my students that it isn’t outside of their reach. Many of my students want to go into some type of engineering and/or science field and being able to work on the computer to produce and analyze data will be something they have to do in the “real world”. While I won’t be an expert at the language in Octave, I’ll have enough of a grasp of it that I can teach my students the basics and hopefully get them excited about potentially learning other computer languages.
2. This goal is directly related to goal #1 and goal #3. A lot of the people at SAMSI run conferences and workshops related to statistics. There was a workshop/conference on Bayesian
My office at SAMSI
Nonparametrics going on this week and I got to observe the logistics of that as well as see a poster session. I’ll also get the opportunity to sit in on a Neuroscience Conference that my mentor is in charge of. It is also a change of pace just working in this atmosphere. I am used to working full days and then some during the school year where we teach and then after the work day is done, we continue to work. Working at SAMSI is completely different! There is much less structure in terms of how your day goes and being able to bring the time management skills I’m developing here to my classroom will be beneficial. A lot of students see a full class period devoted to working on a project as 90 minutes to goof off and socialize rather than a true work period. Being able to give them this example of a work day should be helpful.
Bayesian Nonparametrics Workshop
3. I want to create a project that gives them an idea of what research looks like and how they’ll be expected to communicate it to society. For a better idea of what my project is going to look like, visit my blog post: Welcome to the HSHS Physics Conference. Communication in the sciences is key and students don’t tend to make that connection very easily. I want to be able to create a project that is exciting and gives them the flexibility of investigating their own questions, coming to conclusions, and presenting their findings to a broad audience.