Stat 203 2019F Course Materials
First Assignment (with writing component)
Lab 1: Due in class Thursday, September 5, 2019. For this assignment, you are going to write a proposal (letter of intent, actually) to a hypothetical funding agency that gives grants for undergraduate research. Writing a grant proposal can be a huge undertaking involving an intense effort over a number of weeks. However, sometimes a grant making institution will first ask for a letter of intent, often less than a page, to weed out potential applicants, and save a lot of effort. Successful applicants at this stage will be invited to prepare a longer proposal. A letter of intent can take less than an afternoon to write, and I don't expect this assignment will take much longer for you.
It is important that a letter of intent be presented in a professional manner. It should be formatted as a letter, and have proper grammar and spelling. Before submitting such a letter you would want to have a classmate or friend look over your document---even if English is your first language, but especially if it is not. The creative content of the letter should be each student's own for this assignment (it is OK to talk to others though). That said, in the real world, letters lacking professionalism would not even be considered for creative content---I will grade the assignment similarly. Specifically, if your presentation is poor, you will be graded only on your presentation, just like in the real world.
I should emphasize that although this assignment is hypothetical, there are many actual scholarships and grants available for undergraduate study and research (usually mentored by faculty). So this assignment is more than just an academic exercise: it trains a potentially lucrative skill.
To complete this assignment (see sample below):
- Choose a topic from the list below, or choose your own topic. Try to find data on that topic. Try "Google Dataset Search" and Kaggle.Com. If you can't find data on your topic, choose another topic.
- Your data set must be in "structured" format, as a spreadsheet is, with rows, columns and values (numerical or textual) in each cell. Data not suitable for this assignment is data locked down within interactive visualizations---i.e. data you can run queries for summaries and/or display graphs---but you do not ultimately have complete control over what you do to the data. This type of data set is not generally considered suitable for research purposes.
Now write the letter of intent, and briefly explain:
- Why you are interested in the topic.
- How to find the data set (usually a url or link).
- What data are contained in the data set you have chosen.
Keep your letter to one page or less just as I have done. Expressing yourself with fewer words is better especially if the reviewers need to look at many applications. Your letter must be typewritten, but you do not have to format the letter exactly as I have done. Your topic should be different from mine. You can use fake contact information if you do not want to disclose your email and snail-mail address but use your own name.
Suggested topics for data search: (actually, whatever interests you): sports (of various kinds, there are lots of free good data on baseball), entertainment, movies (again good data), law, criminology, government, city planning, architecture, weather, climate, geology, seismology, medicine, epidemiology, health, fitness, biology, evolution, extinction, ecology, math, computer science, statistics, data science, anthropology, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, sociology, culture, tourism, archeology, art, literature, writing, journalism, census, linguistics, finance, economics, business, astronomy, physics, chemistry, library sciences, theology, anything else you can think of.
