(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Someone writes in:
I am a student at . . . We have been given an assignment that requires us to interview a professional in the criminal justice field who performs, or has performed, statistical analyses on social science related data. . . . We are supposed to collect information pertaining to job description, job responsibilities, typical research projects involved in, etc.
Would you be willing to allow me to interview you via email with questions pertaining to those concepts l? It would only take a few minutes of your time and would be greatly appreciated!
I said sure. Here are the questions I got:
1. Name, title and contact information
2. Job Description, Salary (completely optional)
3. Job Responsibilities
4. Typical Activities
5. Types of Research Activities Involved in
6. Types of Statistical Analyses you engage in
7. Any recommendations to be made to students interested in obtaining a similar job
8. Any education or training that can best prepare students for a similar job
9. Aspects of your job that you most enjoy/least enjoy
And here was my reply:
1. Info is on my webpage
2. Research, teaching and service
3. Teaching classes, advising students, participating in curriculum design, doing research
4. Computing, writing, teaching, meetings with collaborators
5. Social science, public heath, statistical methods
6. Fitting models, graphing data, graphing fitted models
7. Develop useful skills, work on real problems and when you get stuck, ask lots of questions. Accept that your work will be imperfect. Criticize your own work mercilessly and always work on doing better.
8. Training in statistics or related fields such as quantitative political science, economics, or sociology
9. Most enjoy working with colleagues on interesting projects. Nothing that I least enjoy!
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