Faculty Meeting

The regular meeting of the faculty of the Department of Statistics was held at 12:30pm, May 8, 2023. Abel Rodriguez, Department Chair, presided at the meeting. Kristine Chan was recording secretary.

Announcement

The Chair recommended that Principal Investigators (PIs) hold off on participating in the Financial Transformation trainings until after the completion of the transition, as changes to them are expected.  

The course page in statistics website is being revamped. A draft is already up. If you have any suggestions or comments, please forward them to A. Rodriguez at abelrod@uw.edu and our webmaster at webmaster@uw.edu.

The Chair reported on B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. admissions. The number of applicants to the B.S. is substantially down (about a 30% from Spring 2021). There is a feeling among the committee members that the quality of the applicants is also becoming an issue. The same patterns appear to be present for ACMS. A total of 38 students accepted our admissions offers to the M.S. program. We expect some melt before September and to end up with a cohort size slightly above 30 students. As for the Ph.D. program, 9 have accepted but 2 are pending their decision.

ACMS is undergoing proposed revisions but has yet to be approved. See details here. The committee is looking to submit the proposal in June 2023. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please direct them to A. Rodriguez at abeldrod@uw.edu and R. Grove at grover4@uw.edu.

The Chair brought up the possibility of having a Contiguous Undergraduate-Graduate (CUG) program with Biostatistics. This discussion came out of conversations related to the revamp of our B.S. program. The plan is very preliminary and has yet to be presented in the Biostatistics department meeting in the next couple weeks. Depending on the outcome, a draft proposal with more details will be prepared and shared broadly later next year or two. See slide for details.

New Business

The Chair clarified three parallel discussions for the Ph.D. program requirements from the previous faculty meeting that happened on Monday, April 24, 2023.

The first one pertains to student feedback on the Applied Data Analysis Project (ADAP) and prelim exam and looking into possible changes for these requirements to improve the student experience and clarify the learning objectives. This was highlighted as the goal of this meeting. You can see the summary presented by the Graduate Student Representatives  here.

Second is a broader discussion about program requirements to identify issues with tracks (i.e. core verses optional requirements), first year coursework, and overall burden of requirements. A faculty committee will need to be formed and report back on this topic during Academic Year 2023-2024.

Third was to have a broader discussion on student outcomes based on ethnographic and milestones data. This discussion will be happening in Autumn 2023.

Following this discussion, the faculty engaged in a productive discussion about ways to improve student experience and outcomes in the ADAP and Prelim Exam. Some ideas discussed included:

• For the Prelim Exam: (a) cleaning up the list of papers from which students choose their prelim project, (b) making explicit which faculty member proposed a given paper, (c) encouraging faculty to propose papers that align with their current research agenda, (d) clarifying the evaluation criteria in the Ph.D. handbook.
• For the ADAP: (a) revise the text in the Ph.D. handbook to make it clearer under which conditions internships and other experiences can be used to replace the ADAP, (b) clarify the role of other statisticians in the project.

Ph.D. GPC T. McCormick will work with the instructors of STAT 572, the consulting committee, and the Department Chair to implement these changes over the summer (for the ADAP) and for the next round of Prelim Exams (Spring 2024).

Adjournment

There being no other items to discuss, the meeting adjourned at 2:00pm.