This interview with University of Michigan PhD candidates and STATCOM co-presidents Annie Cohen and Hanna Venera was conducted by Practical Significance co-hosts Donna LaLonde and Ron Wasserstein during a recent episode in which they discussed their participation in and vision for Statistics in the Community, or STATCOM. STATCOM is a student-run community outreach program that offers students a unique opportunity to apply their statistical expertise by providing pro bono consulting services to community organizations.
Donna LaLonde: Hanna, tell us about STATCOM and some of its history as a program.
Hanna Venera: STATCOM is a really cool program where students can get involved in volunteering and outreach by using their statistical services in the surrounding community. We provide anything in the statistical process, except for data collection. For example, creating plots and visualizations and analyzing data. It can mean many different things and whatever these nonprofits in the community need from us.
STATCOM is a wonderful way for students to not only get hands-on experience with real-life, messy data, but it’s a way to see the impact in the community around you, which is really valuable.
STATCOM was founded at the University of Michigan in 2006, and we’ve been going strong since then, which is really exciting. It started off in the biostatistics department, and we’re lucky in that we have [had] a lot of students to keep it going throughout the years. But it started across a couple different universities, and we’re hoping to continue that connection. It’s a challenge to keep something going when its student led because of student turnover.
In terms of our goals, we’re focused on outreach for the day-to-day project side, as well as connecting with other universities to get a program started.
Ron Wasserstein: Annie, what inspired you to take on the challenge of reinvigorating STATCOM?
Annie Cohen: We were actually lucky enough to step into this role following a really excellent leadership team headed by Stephen Salerno. He really developed the program into what it is today, and we have been lucky enough to follow in his footsteps. But for me, having this tie to community partners and being able to apply what we’re learning in the classroom to real-world data scenarios and helping community partners that don’t have the resources or experience to run these analyses themselves has been really valuable. Gathering more students for this cause has been really important for my graduate experience.
Donna LaLonde: Speaking of the graduate experience, we know it is very busy. How do you balance the demands of STATCOM projects and your graduate studies?
Hanna Venera: That’s a really great question, because to your point, Donna, there’s a lot of moving parts in graduate school. But from a project perspective, STATCOM really isn’t an overwhelmingly large time commitment, which is typically 1–5 hours a week. And it really does fluctuate depending on where on the project timeline you might be. If you’re wrapping up a deliverable for a client, it might be more of a time commitment that week than others.
What motivates me personally is really that community connection component. Part of the reason I got into biostatistics in the first place is I was struggling to find a place where math and people align. And STATCOM is a concrete way for me to keep finding time for it in my day-to-day life.
From the leadership team standpoint, I haven’t found it to be a really big commitment in a time sense. We think a lot about how to sustain the organization and planning for the next semester and the future [of] the organization. But day to day, the time commitment isn’t extreme, and it really does feel like a valuable way to spend time outside the classroom.
Annie Cohen: One thing that makes the leadership lift less heavy is having several people involved. That not only helps with how much time you spend, yourself, but also helps with that turnover component we talked about. So, knowing that when you leave, it’s not all going to fall apart is reassuring because you have people around you who are sharing that load, as well.
Ron Wasserstein: Would you share an example of a project you’ve worked on?
Annie Cohen: We’ve spoken with multiple community partners who have been looking for this neighborhood-level data surrounding children’s education in Detroit, and I’m currently leading a project with a couple of students and a Detroit-based nonprofit.
We are developing a Shiny dashboard to display publicly available data pulled from various sources at the ZIP code level for the Detroit area based on different variables the community partner has. So different education variables and things that are important and valuable to the community.
This Shiny app will be displayed on a website so families in Detroit can look at the data for their ZIP code and surrounding ZIP codes based on education and other markers of life experience.
This has been a really interesting project for me and exciting because it seems very useful for both the organization we’re working with to assess their own programming within these communities, as well as allowing for Detroiters to view this data and gain their own insights.
Hanna Venera: I worked on a project last year with the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum and Leslie Science Center, which was an especially cool community partner. It was a place I walked by every day when I walked to campus. So, we partnered with them to figure out how they are able to serve the community, who they’re serving, and how they can best improve those services from the data they’ve collected.
For example, much of the programming is geared toward children at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum. They have school trips, and families will come in on the weekends, and they wanted to figure out what age groups they were serving, what kinds of programs are most effective, and how they could continue to serve their community in a way they could continue to connect the membership to something they see value in. So, for example, one thing we explored was a reciprocity program where if you have a membership at some Chicago Museum, could you get into the Hands on Museum for a discount?
So, they were looking at partnerships that would be helpful to the community, as well as what kinds of quality measures they can do. For instance, is there a certain capacity that’s something they need to spread out over time based on when people visit and how much time people spend in the museum? And so, we put that data together for them to figure out how to best proceed in the next couple of years in terms of marketing their membership and how they serve the community.
Donna LaLonde: We’ve discussed the extrinsic benefits of STATCOM but tell us about the intrinsic benefits you and other students have gained from participating in STATCOM.
Hanna Venera: One thing I believe is really neat about STATCOM is students across departments participate. It’s really easy to get stuck in the department you’re in and only surround yourself with those people.
The diversity of perspectives can be really healthy and eye-opening for many reasons. We cross so many different departments from the school of public health, like biostatistics, epidemiology, health behavior, health education, for example, and outside the school of public health, like statistics, bioinformatics, and survey methodology. So, it is a neat way from a networking and social perspective to meet other people in other departments and collaborate with them and see what other people are working on.
In addition, we’ve mentioned working with messy, real-world data—it’s also really valuable to have experiences where you are communicating with a client who may not have the statistical expertise you do. So as a member of a STATCOM team, you’re not only benefiting from a collaborative standpoint, but from a communication standpoint, as well. Yes, you can analyze the data, which is great, but you can also talk about what it means with somebody who doesn’t have that background.
Annie Cohen: I believe it’s really valuable to hear from community partners. We have this statistical expertise, but they might have a more substantial expertise in some other areas and having that balance and learning from partners in that way can be really, really valuable. These relationships create a perspective we don’t always get from the graduate programs we’re part of.
As a leadership team, we try to create student groups for the projects. These teams have a balance of students from different departments, as well as different class levels. We focus on creating opportunities for graduate students. We still try to have a variety of senior PhD students, as well as first-year master’s students—a good mix so older students can practice leadership skills on these projects and the younger students can observe and learn from them in terms of their leadership techniques and practical skills. It’s a really wonderful exchange and opportunity for students to become leaders within these projects, as well.
Ron Wasserstein: What is your long-term vision for STATCOM? How can our listeners get involved?
Annie Cohen: Our main vision is to sustain our organization within the University of Michigan while also spreading the momentum to other institutions and uplifting them in whatever ways we can.
At the end of September, we held a STATCOM 101 webinar for interested students and faculty at other institutions to learn how to get started, how to reinvigorate a current program, and ways to sustain program momentum through the years with student turnover. We’re passionate about applying our expertise with our community partners.
Watch the STATCOM 101 webinar hosted by Cohen and Venera. Resource templates and slides are also available. Reach Cohen and Venera via email.
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