Statistics at Vassar
- Stats@Vassar – a resource for navigating the statistics courses at Vassar , and other general information about statistics
- DataFest @ Vassar – a 48-hour data analysis competition
Discover the world of statistics
- This is Statistics! – find out more about the world of statistics and what statisticians do
- Significance, a statistics outreach magazine jointly published by the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association (access through Vassar library)
- Videos/Talks
- The Joy of Stats – proof that there’s nothing boring about stats (1-hour long video; watch at least a few minutes if you can)
- Gapminder video “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes“
- How not to collaborate with a biostatistician – brilliant video!
- TED Conference Speaker Peter Donnelly shows how stats fools juries
- Blogs and Podcasts
- Practical Significance
- Simply Statistics
- Flowing Data
- Five Thirty Eight (Nate Silver)
- Not So Standard Deviations
- NPR Stats + Stories
- Sense About Science – helping journalists, policy makers, and the public make sense of data science, mathematics, statistics, and quantitative reasoning
- Fun sites
- Stats + Stories
- Gary C. Ramseyer’s First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes
- Spurious Correlations
- Data visualization
- What’s Going On in This Graph?
- Gapminder
- Junk Charts: Recycling chart junk as junk art website
- Resources for learning more
- Coursera course: Data Science Specialization
- DataCamp – for learning R and Python
- New York Times article on R
Opportunities in Statistics
General Resources
- ASA page on careers in statistics
- Read this article published 1/1/2017: ASA Early Career Profiles: Bachelor’s-Level Graduates in Statistics and Data Science – PDF
- “Learn How to Become” Careers in Mathematics (which includes statistician) page
Lists of Summer Programs
- NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in the mathematical sciences (more info)
- Specifically, look into the “American Statistical Association (ASA)” REU, introduced in this article from Amstat News
- American Statistical Association (ASA)’s listing of Internship Opportunities (note: most opportunities are for graduate students but some are for undergraduates; search for “undergraduates” on the page)
- For more opportunities, check out this list of summer programs in statistical science, bioinformatics, and computer science created by Alexander Asemota at Howard University
Summer Program Websites (and some post-grade career opportunities, too)
- Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics (SIBS), at various sites throughout the US
- Data Science Across Disciplines REU at Marquette University
- Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) at various locations (hosted by the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics)
- Big Data Summer Institute at the University of Michigan
- Summer Program in Biostatistics & Computational Biology at Harvard School of Public Health
- LA’s Biostatistics Education Summer Training Program at USC (LA’s BEST @ USC), an opportunity for under-represented undergraduates
- Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Undergraduate Data Science (ISI-BUDS)
- Biostatistics Enrichment Summer Training (BEST) Diversity Program at Columbia University
- Quantitative Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (QSURE) Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan
- Mayo Clinic Division of Biostatistics (internship and career opportunities)
- Energy Information Administration (EIA; internship and career opportunities)
- Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) internship and graduate programs
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program
- Programs for those interested more broadly in medical/biological research (in addition to statistics):
- Summer Undergraduate Internship Program (SUIP)
- Summer Undergraduate Minority Research Program (SUMR) – this has a focus on health services research
- Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) at the University of Illinois
- Bruins-in-Genomics (B.I.G.) Summer Undergraduate Research Program at UCLA
- Programs for those interested in teaching:
- Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) Counselor and Teaching Assistant (more info)
Short Workshops
- Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) hosts short (~2-day) workshops for undergraduates throughout the year (check this page for workshop announcements)
Publicly-available Data Sources
Have a link to add to this list? Please email me so I can add it!
- Google DataSet Search
- Data.gov
- USAFacts
- Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/
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Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)
-
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
- National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Fuel Economy Testing
- World Bank
- Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN
- Gapminder (global data)
- UK Government Data, https://data.gov.uk/search
- College Scorecard
- European statistics, Eurostat
- NYC Open Data: https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/
- Datasets for Machine Learning, Data Mining and Data Science
- Kaggle – these datasets are typically not original; be sure to check for original data sources
Applets*
- Mean and Median: link
- Describing and Comparing Distributions: link
- Correlation
- Guess the correlation game: link (under “Data Analysis”)
- Regression / Least Squares estimation
- Draw your own “best fit” line AND guess the correlation here
- Central Limit Theorem (and Sampling Distributions in general): link
- Probability Distributions
- Normal Approximation to Binomial: link
- Confidence Intervals: link
- Type I and II Errors (applet is at bottom of page): link
*Many of these applets come from the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics