Nels Grevstad

As the original director of the STATCOM program when I was a PhD student in Statistics at Purdue, I had the privilege of helping the program get its feet on the ground and the opportunity to be a part of a university-wide initiative to increase engagement with the community. In the program’s developmental stage, we grappled with the key issues that would need to be addressed in order to make the program successful: how to find student volunteers, and how to make ourselves known to interested clients in the community. The first of these challenges turned out to present no problems: we merely sent out an email describing our vision for the program to all the graduate students in the department and asked for volunteers. We received sufficiently many responses from students eager apply their knowledge that we felt comfortable moving forward with the program. Overcoming the second challenge would mean getting the word out to community organizations. We decided to initially contact just a few target individuals including school superintendents, city officials, and a representative of the city’s symphony orchestra. These initial contacts led to a handful of projects that could then serve in promotional campaigns as examples of what we were capable of doing for clients.

Soon after the initial projects were completed, the university’s Office of Engagement provided us with a grant and announced the formation of our new program to a number of community groups with which it was in contact. A few weeks later we were invited to give a presentation at a meeting of directors of community organizations, and this led to a number of additional projects with clients such as a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, a community center, and the YWCA.

Now the ball was rolling, and as I began research for my PhD thesis, I relinquished my position as STATCOM director. Currently I’m a Professor of Statistics at Metropolitan State College of Denver, and plan to start a program similar to STATCOM at my institution. I know from my experience with STATCOM what it will take to make such an endeavor a success.