A statistics course
committed to honest data analysis,
focused on mastery of best-practice models,
and obsessed with the dynamics of financial markets
The Teaching Assistant for Stat 434 is Dan McCarthy, who for the moment has email and a website. You should check out his website if you think you have a question for which he has posted an answer that came up in office hours, etc.
Dan will have office hours
Dan can also offer help via his email, or in some circumstances even make other times to meet with you, but be sensible in your demands on his time outside of office hours.
I am sure that you will find Dan quite helpful when you are stuck, but you should keep in mind that it is not Dan's job to solve your homework problems. He can help you get started, or he can help you get unstuck, but he can't help (too much) with the core challenge of figuring out what is going on in a particular data set.
Besides, you will want to have some good stories to tell when we are discussing the homework in class, and this is only possible if you do your own work.
The homework assignments and the final project are really situations where the process is the product.
In any genuinely original work, there is inevitably some agony of uncertainty. Itt is an important skill to learn how to deal with such challenges. Everyone in statistics has spent a considerable amount of time dealing with "too much noise and too little signal."
In a sense, this is what the discipline is all about. If the signals were clear, one would not need statistical methods --- and if standard methods worked all the time, there would not be any research.
My office is 447 Huntsman Hall and my office hours are
If you don't happen to see me in my office some Wednesday, look for me in the 4th floor seminar room where I might be guiltily eating a cookie and talking with the seminar speaker. Hopefully, I will not be eating too many cookies this year. I say that every year.
Best of all, I am available essentially all of the time via e-mail.
Moreover, I am genuinely happy to hear from you --- either just for fun or if there is a problem of some kind.
Steele's Office 447 JMHH
Dan's Office 427 JMHH
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