Salon 2
Two Boomers and a Millenial: Lessons from an Intergenerational Collaboration (303210)
*Jane Oppenlander, Clarkson UniversityPatricia Schaffer, Total Quality Associates
Eva Williford, University at Albany
Keywords: collaboration, career, mentoring, applications
The careers of a statistician and data scientist intersected in 1990 when we were asked to co-teach a graduate course in Management Information Systems. Our collaboration has continued and evolved as we each pursued different career paths. In 2010 a millennial biostatistician, at the start of her career, joined the collaboration. All three of us began with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and have gone on to careers that have included industrial, academic and government employment and small business ownership where we have applied statistics and data science to a broad range of problems in the fields of healthcare, engineering, and education. In this presentation we compare and contrast our experiences with mentoring, technology, research, teaming, and teaching. We discuss how our collaboration has influenced each of our careers and offer our lessons to those starting and finishing their careers in the big world of data.