I like to give back to my professional community. One of the ways I’m doing that in 2024 is to lead a discussion at the eCOTS (electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics) conference on “Connecting industry statisticians and educators needing field-specific teaching examples” (unfortunately they beat up my name).

What does this mean, and why did the Statistics Department Chair from Grinnell University and I decide we needed to instigate this discussion? In many universities, math and especially statistics is more of an after-thought. Students who take a statistics class taught by the lone statistician on campus, or taught by a mathematician who is pulling double duty as the lone statistics instructor on campus, tend not to be headed into math as a field. In the Faculty Learning Community I am participating in this year, many of these professors were lamenting that they didn’t know what types of projects these students would be interested in.

For example, someone who is headed into Human Resources will do better if they understand probability and statistics, but they aren’t going to be motivated in their undergraduate required Statistics For Non-Majors course if all of the examples are from physics, chemistry, or ecology. Similarly, future physicians will be much better readers of their statistically based medical research journals if they’ve done well in their Statistics 101 course, but they’re more likely to pay attention in college if their examples are about success rates of knee replacements or other medical topics.

Those of us who are statisticians coming from industry have examples like these from our fields at our finger tips. This discussion is meant to connect instructors who don’t have these examples, with the examples they need, and build a database of such examples for future use. It is a great opportunity to help both statistics professors and future students of statistics all at once.

What are you doing, that makes you feel good about your professional expertise and helps your professional community?