Letter From the Department Chair 2015

I feel privileged to be completing my second year as chair of the Cal Poly Statistics Department because of the tremendous students and faculty who study and learn and teach and work together here. I'd also like to thank you, our alumni, donors and friends, whose support is so important to us.

Here are a few updates on what's happened here in the 18 months since the previous newsletter.

 

Growth

One exciting development is the dramatic increase in the number of statistics majors and the number of students taking courses beyond the introductory level. Here are some data on which I base this assertion:

• Enrollments in our core 300-level courses for statistics majors and minors have increased by a factor of more than 2.5, i.e., more than 150 percent, during the past four years.
  • During the 2014-15 academic year, we taught 125 students in the Regression Analysis course (STAT 324) and 90 students in the Experimental Design and Analysis course (STAT 323). We offered five sections of STAT 324 this year and three sections of STAT 323, compared to two and one sections, respectively, a few years ago.
  • We’ve seen similar growth in our statistical computing courses, with 74 students studying SAS (STAT 330) and 65 students studying R (STAT 331) this academic year.
• We’ve had large enrollments in several 400-level elective courses this year, including 41 students in Time Series (STAT 416) and 31 students in Survival Analysis (STAT 417).
• For the first time this year, we offered two sections of our capstone course in Statistical Consulting and Communication (STAT 465).

A record 25 statistics majors are planning to graduate in June. Lest you think that our hallways and classrooms will be deserted next year, we have 39 students entering the major this coming September, 34 freshmen and five transfers. This also represents a record number for our program by a large margin. (To be clear, both of these are record high numbers!)

Curriculum

Another exciting development is that we will begin offering an interdisciplinary minor program in data science in the fall. This program, a joint venture between statisticians and computer scientists, will introduce students to the computing and statistical skills needed to work with and draw insights from the large data sets that are ubiquitous these days. We will develop four new courses in data science, including two capstone courses that involve substantial work with real clients.

Also under the heading of curriculum updates, new courses in applied probability models, statistics education, and SAS advanced certification preparation will also be offered for the first time next year, although the latter two have been offered on a trial basis.

In addition, three groups of faculty have invested considerable time this year preparing curriculum revisions for the 2017-19 catalog. Part of the motivation for these discussions has stemmed from an updated set of guidelines issued by the American Statistical Association (ASA) for undergraduate statistics programs. Cal Poly’s Beth Chance was one of 10 statisticians who developed these ASA guidelines. The three working groups in our department have been focused on how to improve our students’ communication and computing skills and modernize our intermediate-level courses in statistical modelling.

Department Highlights

We're thrilled to welcome four new faculty members this year and next, whom you can read about in this newsletter. It’s always dangerous, perhaps foolish, to highlight a few of our faculty members, but I wanted to congratulate Soma Roy and Jimmy Doi, both of whom earned promotions in the past year. You can find out what they and the rest of the faculty have been up to in the faculty updates.

We've also highlighted a few of our students' more impressive accomplishments, a difficult selection because many of our students are involved with exciting study opportunities, projects, internships and research experiences.

Alumni News

I continue to be extremely impressed and delighted with what our alumni have achieved in their professional and personal lives. If your name does not appear in the alumni notes, please do contact me and let me know what’s new so I can spread the news. I am especially eager to hear from alumni who graduated less recently (notice how I carefully avoided any mention of age in that statement).

Best wishes for a wonderful summer,
Allan Rossman
arossman@calpoly.edu