With the beginning of the school year you'll find many new and exciting opportunities to learn and expand your own skill sets, both inside and outside the classroom. The following is a guest blog post from Ella Braden, LILAC's STEM Coordinator on the upcoming Data & You Mini-Intensive.
Specifically, this Intensive is an opportunity to develop your skills in Data Management and Preservation and in Data Analysis and Presentation, two of Bryn Mawr's Digital Competencies areas. Various offices around campus are engaging students and highlighting opportunities involving the digital competencies--check out the Digital Competencies website for more information.
Data and You
On September 23 and 24th, students will have the opportunity to explore data through an unusual lens: What can you do with it, and why would you bother? This is the most recent in a series of STEM Intensives; short, co-curricular courses exploring elements of non-research STEM careers.
During Data and You, a two-day mini-intensive, students will have the opportunity to spend a day putting data in context: How does one collect or find reliable data? How do we create useful information out of the mass of data that’s available to us? How do you interpret what you learn from data?
The first day of the program will feature a brainstorming session led by Bryn Mawr’s Chief Information Officer, Gina Seising. Students will wrap their minds around data classification and how web developers use metadata to create content and population pages automatically. We will use excel to work though data cleaning, pivot tables and data visualization.
On the second day of the program, students will break into parallel sessions for experience working with one of several data tools. Area experts will bring their professional and research knowledge to lead workshops in topical fields.
Students will use R and SPSS to gain useful correlations in a public health setting in an session led by Harriet Okatch, MPH, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology & Public Health and Janine Everett, Director of the Public Health Program, both at Franklin and Marshall College. Megan Heckert, an urban geographer, and assistant professor at West Chester University, will lead an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS) using Esri. Olivia Castello, the Bryn Mawr social sciences librarian, will lead students through the collection, recording and basic analysis of qualitative data using NVivo.
Through these three sessions, students will get a better flavor for what practitioners in a wide variety of fields do with their field-specific data and how to incorporate those data skills into their own career exploration and development.
Interested students can apply for the Data & You Intensive through Handshake.
To learn more about the digital competencies, please visit brynmawr.edu/digitalcompetencies or email digicomp@brynmawr.edu.