Course participants discuss presentation skills during a group exercise.

A presentation skills course was held for members of the North Carolina Chapter at the SAS campus in Cary, North Carolina, in May. The instructors were Bob Starbuck, who contributed to the development of the course content under a 2012 ASA presidential initiative, and Bobby Gutierrez, a SAS employee who took the first “train-the-trainer” course, given at JSM 2012 in San Diego.

Twenty-five people from universities (students and faculty), industry, and government attended the one-day course, coming from as far away as Charlotte and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Feedback from the attendees was highly positive. “I strongly recommend this course because it teaches statisticians to think carefully about their audiences and to communicate appropriately for a specific audience,” commented participant Gerardo Hurtado. The chapter is now considering conducting the course in other North Carolina locations.

For other ASA chapters, giving the course is a great opportunity to provide value to their members, and a number of trained ASA volunteer instructors are available. To learn more about how your chapter can arrange the course, contact Ron Wasserstein, ASA executive director, at ron@amstat.org. Likewise, if you have completed the “train-the-trainer” course and are interested in presenting it, contact Wasserstein for more information.