Today, we came in and met with Dr. Laber in the conference room first thing…surprise surprise! With more calculus, I remained very lost on most of the equations and computational facts about statistics he put up on the board. After struggling to understand some of the terms, we got free donuts along with the rest of the office and he gave us a statistics problem to solve on our own. To my own disbelief, we got it RIGHT! After not understanding the majority of the morning lessons we had been having, getting something right and beginning to grasp a concept was fabulous. Of course our explanation was not even close to the one that Dr. Laber showed us a statistician would have used to get the same answer…but still the right answer! The former Dean of the Statistics Department at NC State then came and talked to us. We talked a lot about the college process since he has worked on the executive boards of multiple universities and currently is the Dean of Statistics at Oregon State. He has a daughter who is the same age as me, so he could relate to exactly where we were at students at the moment which was a refreshing point of view in the department! After this, we met with Brian who was another member in the Statistics Department. He told us about fascinating projects he had done, how he got into statistics, and kind of his story to where he is now. It was really neat hearing the point of view of someone who truly had the perspective that people like Luke and I could do projects like the complicated dust spatial problems which made it onto a CSI episode! He believed that the concepts were simpler than they seem…but I agree to disagree. We went and ate some lunch and then met Ryan Martin, one of the most published Statisticians in the country who also is in the Stats Department at NC State after lunch. He told us about the two main methods of statics, the classical method and the Bayesian method. The really neat thing, was that he had created Inferential Models, a third method which he hoped would spread nationally through teachings and the book he published to become one of the three main methods of statistics. He had a really interesting perspective being the only person we had talked to thus far who enjoyed the statistics for the pure math and less so for the applications. Overall, meeting all of these new people was eye-opening and tomorrow we are planning to help out with a project in the Bureau of Mines with graduate students again.
