Meike Niederhausen

I started working with STATCOM when I officially joined the Department of Statistics as a Masters student specializing in Computational Finance in the fall of 2003. At this point I had already taken many courses in probability theory since I was primarily a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics, but had only taken one course in statistics. In the spring of 2004 I finished my MS in Statistics, but I continued working with STATCOM until I finished my PhD in August 2005. Since then I have been an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland in the Department of Mathematics, where I mainly teach courses in probability and statistics.

While involved with STATCOM, I worked on developing a food satisfaction survey for a nonprofit retirement home in the community and also analyzing results from a student parking survey for Housing and Food Services at Purdue. In addition I was active with the P-12 Outreach group. My main contributions were in helping out with Spring Fest in 2005 and preparing interesting probability activities for adolescents attending Camp Calcium in July 2005.

I initially joined STATCOM since I felt it was a beneficial way for me to use my technical skills to give back to the community. In addition I wanted to have some experience using the statistics I had been learning in the classroom and to see how it is applied in the consulting setting. In retrospect I gained much more than that though. Other useful skills that I picked up include how to work with a team, communicate statistical concepts to a client, and write up a technical report.

Overall I believe that being involved with STATCOM was one of the most worthwhile experiences I had while in graduate school. By having the opportunity of working on consulting projects and discussing them with my peers, I was able to gain a deeper understanding of statistics and how to apply it to the real world. Now that I am a professor I realize just how beneficial these experiences were and how they have been helpful to me in my current position.

First of all I feel that STATCOM has helped me become a better teacher. Learning how to communicate probabilistic and statistical concepts to clients and P-12 children gave me excellent preparation for teaching these subjects to college students. I am also able to bring in my personal experiences from STATCOM into the classroom as examples to make it more interesting for my students. For example, learning about correlation is always more fun if it involves data about cricket spitting collected from Spring Fest!

The skills I learned from being involved with STATCOM have also been useful when helping my students with their own projects that I assign in the elementary statistics courses. Having been influenced by STATCOM, I do encourage my students to consider using social justice issues that interest them as topics for their projects and/or using on campus offices or nonprofit groups that they might already be involved with as clients for their projects. I have found that the University of Portland is very receptive to this, and is in particular encouraging the faculty through various grants and workshops to expand their students’ involvement with community based learning.

In the future I would also like to find community partners with whom the math majors could also gain some of the types of experiences as I did with STATCOM. Such a project would require supervision of course, but it would hopefully make statistics more interesting to the students and be beneficial to their endeavors after college.