A Recap of 2011: Teaching, Consulting, and a Wedding

By Professor Jimmy Doi

This was my eighth year at Cal Poly. In the fall term I had a chance to teach Stat 150 once again but this time I was able to team up with Dr. Soma Roy. One of the key components of this class is to help develop students' written and oral presentation skills. And one of the great joys in teaching this class is to witness some of the incredible improvements our students exhibit. By the end of the quarter, many of our students become very polished and well spoken presenters.

This past winter quarter, I taught the categorical data analysis for the third time and it was an extremely enjoyable experience. My dissertation topic is from categorical data analysis, so this topic is clearly one of my favorites! But I am now scheduled to return to our Stat 330 course (SAS) and I very much look forward to revamping my course notes to introduce new trends in SAS that have developed over the years.

I have been working on a few consulting projects over the past year and thankfully we are approaching the point where we will be finishing up our manuscripts. With any luck, our submissions to the peer-reviewed journals will be accepted!

One of the biggest projects I worked on this year was serving as the lead local organizer for the 2011 WNAR/IMS Conference held on campus in June. It has been incredibly time consuming to prepare for this event, but thankfully with the help of our administrative coordinator Melody Pietsch and Dr. Soma Roy things fell into place. For more details about the conference, please read the corresponding article I’ve written in this newsletter.

It has been a wonderful year for me in many respects and it has been a very challenging one too as it has been one of the busiest among the eight years I’ve been here. But I’m happy to say that this academic year ends on an especially high note for me because on July 2nd, 2011, I got married! My fiancée, Midori Okugawa, and I exchanged our vows on the island of Maui in the presence of special friends and family. I look forward to introducing this very special lady in my life to everyone in the department.