Blog from Joshua Landon, Associate Professor of Statistics and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Statistics
I am honored to be a part of this year’s GWALA cohort, it’s been a wonderful experience. I am an Associate Professor of Statistics and became the director of the department’s undergraduate program three years ago. I was nominated for GWALA by my department chair Judy Wang, who thought I could benefit from a program such as this, and she was absolutely right!
Upon starting GWALA we were asked to identify a project for us to work on. I noticed that there was not much of a community amongst our undergraduate majors. Even though they took a lot of the same classes, none of them really knew each other. So I decided to make the undergraduate program my project so I could do something about it! We have organized events in the past, for example, when we have had good speakers visiting the department, we have invited undergraduate students to attend, but the turnout was always very poor from the undergraduate students.
On March 22, we jointly hosted STAT day with George Mason University. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to get the students together, so I asked them all to attend, and organized a great lineup of speakers to talk to them. The highlight was Robert Santos, the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau. GW Hatchet wrote an article about his STAT day speech. He loved talking to and getting to know the students and they loved what he had to say. They also all signed up for the American Statistical Society (ASA) GWU student chapter at this event. Many of them are now competing in cross-university competitions together as a team, such as the upcoming DC DataFest competion. I’m proud of how the students are now working together, and I feel that this would not have happened without my inspiration from GWALA.
My favorite GWALA session was conflict resolution. I get a lot of complaints from students about professors, other students, courses, etc. and I feel the way I was handling these complaints was not perfect. I now use the conflict resolution tool all the time, it’s been a huge help!
Lastly, I’m so happy to have met the remarkable group of people in this cohort. I look forward to continued engagement with the colleagues that I have met, as well as a continued commitment to improvement.