2011 WUSS Conference- Jimmy Doi
The 2011 Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference was held October 12-14 at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco. I had the pleasure of attending this conference for the first time, and it was a real treat. Fellow faculty member Rebecca Ottesen served as one of the lead organizers for the event, as she has for many years. In addition, a large number of Cal Poly students, many of whom were WUSS scholarship recipients, attended the conference.
Congratulations to all scholarship winners: Jennifer Gildner, Maxwell Klingmann, Chelsea Lofland, Christopher Moore, Shawna Perry, Diana Said, Diana Shealy, Lauren Soltesz and Sean Taylor. As is usually the case at WUSS, Cal Poly had the largest number of students receiving the Student Scholar award.
In the Applications Development section, Cal Poly statistics major Diana Shealy gave a superb presentation titled "Benefits of JAVA Within SAS: Exploring the Differences of the New JavaObj and SAS/IML Studio." Diana is extremely knowledgeable in SAS, and due to her high level of expertise, several audience members were shocked to learn that she was only an undergraduate student. I later heard from Diana that several potential employers met with her afterwards and she received one or two job offers.
In the Resources section, I gave a presentation titled "This Is How We Do It: Teaching SAS in the Cal Poly Statistics Department." This paper was written by Rebecca Ottesen, Ulric Lund, Karen McGaughey and me. As the title suggests, we presented how we have taught Statistical Computing with SAS and Advanced Topics in SAS within the statistics studio environment; we also offered many helpful tips and resources for teaching SAS. At the end of the conference we were pleasantly surprised to learn that we received the best paper/presentation award for the Resources section.
During the conference, it was a pleasant surprise for us to bump into some recent Cal Poly statistics alumni including Jordan Keene, Kaycee Roeser, Huey Dodson and Max Wise. It was so nice to catch up with them and find out how they've been enjoying life and also how they've been using SAS in their careers.
Diana Shealy wasn’t the only student who made a big splash at WUSS. After encountering our big entourage of Cal Poly students at the conference, Margo Stutesman, one of the SAS executives attending WUSS, tweeted the following:
@calpolystatclub are the smartest Stat students I ever met. It's the best part of #WUSS11
Coming from someone who has surely met many students at similar conferences in the past, this is high praise!
