Caroline Birdrow and Jaime Joseph, ASA GivesBack Leadership Team
ASA GivesBack is a group of ASA members whose goal is to give back to their local and statistical communities.
Last year’s programming kicked off with the group’s annual Thank a Mentor project, in which ASA members share their stories about people who made a difference in their statistical journeys. The highlighted mentors were Haviland Wright (nominated by Alison Turner), Jesse Canchola (nominated by Russell Yang), and Yehenew Kifle (nominated by Mouhamed Oloude).
Next came the JSM Impact Project, a community service initiative for Joint Statistical Meetings attendees to join during the conference. The group partnered with Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee, to collect toiletries and comfort items that help bring normalcy to patients and their families. Several ASA members ordered items from their Amazon wish list and/or made monetary donations.
In May, ASA GivesBack members launched the ASA Virtual Science Fair to engage K–12 students during the summer. The overarching goals were to encourage students to ask questions, learn experiment design, and gain experience with collecting and organizing data. They also practiced drawing conclusions and sharpened their presentation skills.
To end the year, the group held a haiku/meme contest to get the creative juices of the community flowing! The winning submissions are the following:
Meme Category
1st Place: Mark Ramos
Haiku Category
Graduate Level
1st Place: Alyssa Columbus
I’m mostly certain
this joke will land just about –
there. Give or take some.
Professional Level
1st Place: Larry Lesser
Statisticians now
must be ready to deal with
data that’s censored.
Honorable Mention: Charlie Smith
Nighttime thunderstorms
Pets and children crowd my bed
Equal sample sizes
3rd Place: Benjamin Leinwand
my model has fit
the data extremely well
a little too well
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