Advice for Business Stats Students

The Business Statistics project was very helpful in that it allowed me to fully grasp the main topics discussed throughout the course by implementing them into a real-life situation. It is a large project, however, and I can offer some advice with hindsight:

· Since this an extensive project I would definitely recommend working with a partner. It is always valuable to have a second opinion and to have two people available to check and edit the work being produced.

· Although it is not required, I advise you to obtain a larger sample. This is important when you calculate your results, for there will be a smaller standard error and the results will be more significant.

· As for topics, make sure you choose one that interests you. It is a good idea to examine events that are currently occurring, whether those happen to be on or off campus. At the moment, a study could be completed on the 4.75% tuition increase that was just announced for the next academic year. What do students think about this? What about faculty and staff? This study would yield very important results.

Project Advice

1.
To future students, I’d advise them to get a partner. However, they should be careful in selecting one, because the research project is a long one where they’ll be spending a lot of time with one another. Therefore, they’ll want to get a partner that they can come to rely upon to help accomplish the project together. Also, they should try avoiding do anything last minute.
2.
Interesting topics rely on the interest of the people doing the research. If they’re athletes, they could do something that concerns athletics, such as comparing the amount of time athletes spend on getting treatment for injuries to the GPA. If they’re into wildlife, they could do research on LandSea and see if those who participate in the program are those whose families make the most income compared to those who don’t participate.

Advice

The first advice that I can give is to choose a topic in which you are really interested. Indeed, this project is a very big and long project, so it’s very important to have interest in what you are working on. Second, I would recommend finding a partner you trust and want to work with because you are going to spend a lot of time with him or her. The topic should be interesting but at the same time it has to be something you are sure that you are going to find a lot of variables, correlations between these variables. I suggest focusing the survey on the K College population because the time given to survey people is very short and it’s maybe hard to go out of the campus. It’s very important to be attentive in class, to attend to each class because everything done in this class is important for the project and better understood thanks to the explanations of the teacher than with the book. It’s important to start to work on the project from the day the teacher give you the assignment because it takes a lot of time (from 10 to 20 hours I would say). I would recommend to work with your partner for every section and not to divide the work into two parts. Finally, I think that it’s very important to give importance to this project, because besides being an important part of your final grade, it’s probably one of the most useful things I’ve done this year at K College (I’m international student) that is going to be useful for me for my studies and probably for my future job.

I would suggest for a new and interesting project to survey students about their food habits, about their opinion concerning the food in the cafeteria because I think that students are aware that the food proposed here at K College is questionable and a lot of them would answer this topic. Besides, it would be interesting because foods habits are very important for health of students and it’s today a big problem and I suppose that it affects students more than what we could expect. It could be interesting to compare the results found with other colleges or with other countries. For example, even if we can think that the food of the cafeteria is bad here, it’s possible, I guess, to demonstrate that it’s maybe worse for students in Europe because they don’t take time to eat lunch in a cafeteria and eat everyday bad sandwiches.

By Mathieu Bouvard

Some Advice

Be sure to dedicate a lot of time towards this project and to start right away, it takes longer than than you may think.
It would be helpful for you to get your survey out first so people wont turn down your survey because they did a few already.
Input your survey data as soon as you get responses, if you collect all surveys and then try to input the data it will take a very long time and it is quite boring.
Be sure to save your work often, you dont want to have to put in data multiple times just because of a technical error.
Number the surveys, both on the survey and in the computer, when you are putting them into the computer so you can go back to that survey if there was a mistake.

An interesting topic might be how the money Kalamazoo college receives is distributed amongst students, in the form of grants or scholarships, and facilities.

Thoughts and advice

-Choose a topic that is fresh, something that is different or interesting that is happening right now, not something that will always be there.

-Keep your data well organized and have a copy saved separately so that if you mess up some of your numbers they are saved somewhere you can recover them.

-Choose a subject that people on campus will find interesting so they will be more likely to so your survey

-Be one of the first groups to send your survey out.

-In hindsight I wish I had done something on “The Big Surprise” and people’s opinions on the new social justice center. I think picking something that is current is important.

Advice and an Idea

There are several pieces of advice that I would give to students that are just starting out on their stats project. The first is to pick a topic that is meaningful not only to you but also to the students that are taking the surveys. This is especially important for the surveyor because you will be spending a lot of time working with this data and information. The second piece of advice that I would give is to have as much numerical data as possible, dummy variables can help show relationships but having a lot of numbers allows for the regressions to go much smoother. The final piece of advice that I want to give is that you should push to get as large of sample population as possible so that the standard error is smaller and the findings are more significant and relevant. I think that an interesting topic to explore is how the general population feels about this new social justice tilt that the college has taken and how the students see the money that is allocated to it. This idea would definitely be pertinent as we move on with the different ways that the school allocates money.

Word of Advice

Word of Advice

This project will be as fun as you make it. I encourage you to pick a topic that you are interested in. Find something that is relevant on campus or happening in the news, it makes things more enjoyable when you can relate your findings to what is happening outside of campus. Once you have picked a topic of interest, do some research to figure out the different aspects you want to research. The more developed a plan you have for the project, the easier it is to create the survey. Make sure your survey addresses all the aspects you want to investigate; this is key when you go to do the analysis at the end.

I know everyone keeps saying it, but make sure you continue to work on the project throughout the entire quarter. This project is very time consuming. One of the hardest parts is getting people to respond to the survey. We used an online site and had a drawing for a Biggby gift card, but still had trouble getting over 40 responses. Maybe offer an iTunes gift card for better responses??

If you are trying to decide on a topic I would suggest first deciding if you are going to work alone or with a partner. From there you will have a better idea of where your research will be headed. Any topic can be interesting, from student debt to eating habits. It could be interesting to look at the number of students or faculty who recycle, considering K prides itself on being environmentally friendly. You could try to relate it to how K does in Recycle Mania.