Intro: Derek Sollberger "The Median Data Scientist"

  1. Derek Sollberger

    Greetings!  I---Derek Sollberger---am a lecturer at the University of California at Merced (middle of California, near Yosemite).  There I am a math teacher by title, but I have been teaching the data science courses for the biology majors for the past 5 years, and I have been unofficially adopted by the biological sciences department to teach the bioinformatics courses.  There I heard about BioQuest and this will be my first time at a BioQuest event.  Sometimes I act as a consultant for grad students for data science and I am a statistical consult for professors who are starting to implement active learning techniques.

     

    Most of my job is focused on teaching, and I lead a couple of distinct data science courses:

    • R (mostly sophomores): R Markdown, tidyverse, probability, exploratory data analysis, Shiny homework
    • Python (mostly seniors): Jupyter notebooks, medical imaging, Pandas, object-oriented programming, DNA analysis

     

    This summer, I am in the midst of virtually back-to-back-to-back conferences

    • useR!2019 (R programmers)
    • QUBES :-)
    • SEPAL (active learning)

    and I am starting to regret my decisions (sarcasm).

     

    At QUBES, perhaps a few of us could gather and share ideas about how to increase student engagement and enthusiasm.  Also, does anyone want to find a restaurant to eat blue crab?

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  2. Dmitry Kondrashov

    Hey Derek,

    I'm with you both on brainstorming approaches to student engagement and to exploring seafood restaurants! I think our hosts (Drew LaMar, et al) could be a helpful resources for the latter, and probably the former as well...

    Dmitry

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  3. Raymond L Tremblay

    Derek and Dmitry....  I'm in for both.  Most of my students are health oriented, thus to get them engaged in R and data analysis is a challenge, so ideas are welcomed.  

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  4. Carrie Diaz Eaton

    Derek - your classes sound pretty interesting... love to hear more about what you are doing. Now that I'm teaching courses that are in the "computer science" department, I find students know they are going to do programming, so it is an expectation, but they also come prior expectations about what programming is that I have to work to dispel. It's like they are coming with enthusiasm for becoming a lone hacker out of an intro class when what I really want them to do is to be able to think about the problem space deeply before writing anything, make code legible to others, and create a cooperative learning community. Very different audience than when I used to teach for a biology department. I'd love to trade ideas with folks! On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 3:34 PM Raymond L Tremblay @ QUBES < support@qubeshub.org> wrote: ---- Emailed forum response from mathprofcarrie@gmail.com

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