Sara Skates

Proud Teaching Moment

Admittedly, my teaching "focus" has shifted since I switched over to being the Institutional Researcher for the college, rather than a faculty member doing some insitutional research as part of my job.  I teach less (way less, only "on overload" when I choose to accept an overload assignment), but I have managed to maintain my student-mentoring focus with my grant. (Other parts of my grant work have been utterly neglected, but let's not go there.)

I have three students working on the grant.  One is a grad student, one is an undergrad, and one is a recently graduated undergrad who is still working a little on the project.  I emailed all three suggesting they (a) submit a presentation or poster proposal to the SAS Global Forum, and (b) submit an application to the SAS Student Ambassador program.  Two bit the bullet and submitted proposals.

The Global Forum is SAS's annual professional conference - attended by SAS geeks from a variety of fields and disciplines.  I went to one back in the early 90s, or possibly I am mis-remembering and I went to a regional one - back when it was called NESUG.  They are large conferences, with lots of hard-core SAS users in attendance.  I confess I felt a little out of place there - I use SAS, and I'm pretty good at it, but not at that level.  Or perhaps it was just that I was professionally young, and hadn't yet found my "confidence" at such things.  Anyway.

The Student Ambassador program is competitive and recognizes and supports a few students who use SAS in their fields - paying their way, and highlighting their presentations. 

I just got word today that at least one of my students has been selected - the recently-graduated student.  He will be presenting on using SAS to graphically display longitudinal data analysis trends at the individual and group level.  One of the real highlights of this grant research is having access to solid longitudinal data - so far, there are 10 waves of data collection available on deaf children and their siblings - with information about their schooling, families, etc.  It is hairy data to sort through precisely because it is longitudinal - but the promise it holds is definitely exciting.

And I am a very proud faculty mentor!  Which is nice to feel - while teaching is not a core part of my IR job, I'm keeping my hand in it - and it is rewarding.  And I sure don't miss all the grading - bwaaa haaa haaa!

Presenting Data

We're back from Toronto, the trip was great, though one of the skates boots is too small so there will be another trip in 2-8 weeks for a hopefully correctly-sized pair (depends on which option they pick for fixing the sizing issue - re-doing part of the current boot, or making a whole new one).  The kids had a good time at their sleepover with friends Doney and Dianne, we had a good time at the B&B and exploring the Queen St. area of Toronto as well as the historic Cabbagtown area.  ("Exploring" might be pushing it.  We weren't there that long.)  (Case in point, we walked RIGHT BY this yarn store, and I wasn't allowed to go into it.  Something about already having a lot of yarn.  Click on the "HOME" tab, I dare you.  The fact that they were having a sale is - um, well, no, I'm not bitter.  Not at all.)  Terry left shortly upon our return to go pick up her new-to-her horse from CT.  She's almost back now - whew. 

In my blog travels today, I found this video clip - a fabulous presentation on sharing data effectively and informatively.  It's really worth watching - the guy practically becomes part of his slides in his excitement - and the slides are so well done.  I started here at Creating Passionate Users, and then went to PresentationZen, (where I watched the video), and then found and linked the google video version that has options for downloading (PC/Mac, IPOD, etc.).

And on my to-do list now is playing around with Gapminder software.  It's free, it's designed to bridge the gap between publicly available data and knowing what that data is saying.  It's like a web animated version of Edward Tufte, from what I can gather.

At the moment though, I need to go duke it out with some real live non-publicly shared data, and get it to behave.  Unfortunately, current purposes do not require visual presentation - the end goal is an excel file.  I'll change the world of Institutional Research at my college another day ;)