My graduate school experience: 2nd semester - ITEC 6000: Statistical Applications In Industry

The second of the core courses was my statistics class that I took in Spring of 2006. It was a tough class but it was also a great course. My instructor Dr. Paul Kauffman, ECU's department of engineering chair, http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/alumni/TECS_newsletter/nexus/nexusVol2no6.htm#4 was one of the most organized professor. He knew exactly how to conduct a distance education course. What he did was record lectures that had himself explaining the stat subject we were studying at the time. This helped a great deal to understand the tougher concepts. He also created and made available for download good PowerPoint presentations.

Another cool thing is that we used Excel to build alot of our homework submissions. I learned many of the built in Excel functions and the book usually had a section for each chapter that showed you how to build a spreadsheet.

Here is a snapshot of what we studied:

1) Data collection using surveys - Good interesting start to the semester. I actually used this information to help my team create a user survey to get input on how they liked our software.

2) Analyzing large data sets using frequency distributions and displaying histograms.

3) Measures of central tendency (mean, median, quartile ranges).

4) Data variation and shape using box and whisker plots.

5) Coefficient of correlation to measure strength of linear relationship

6) Probability.

There are a few more things that I need to look up. Plus the book, I will post the book title when I get back to work.