Keywords: Community, students, opportunities, leadership
With the increased interest in statistics after the most recent presidential election, statisticians have been called upon to increase engagement within both the scientific community and the general public. Time spent in a university setting gives students valuable practice in engagement and community building. Graduate students of the Vanderbilt Biostatistics program will discuss their efforts to build community both within the department and the wider communities of Vanderbilt and Nashville. Specifically, we will tackle leadership within departments, within a university-level setting, within professional societies, and additional opportunities. The second half of the session will feature audience participation to brainstorm opportunities for women in statistics and share their experiences with community-building. Examples include organizing R Ladies groups, creating a student-run journal club, and developing programming tutorials. We seek to answer the question: “How can we best support other students, especially women?” We will also solicit ideas on creating a centralized list of opportunities for graduate student opportunities in the statistics and data science fields.