In case you were wondering, Taylor Swift released four new songs today. Of course, I listened to them as soon as they came out. So far, I think I like them. Luckily for me, I will have plenty of time on my drive home later to relisten and analyze the lyrics. This weekend is my sister-in-law’s wedding (and I guess my brother’s too). This means I have the exciting task of showing one of my college friends my hometown. I keep warning her that there will be more cows than people, but I do not think she believes me. Besides my weekend adventures and new music, I got to go rock climbing this past week and was offered the opportunity to attend a networking event for my marketing class. 

Focusing back on Statistics and Data Science Consulting, this week I spent some time building up the various aspects of my package. Of course, I have decided to make everything pink and Jordan showed me a Taylor Swift dataset that I could possibly use. I think my helper function is pretty solid. I have the base code done and it can be used to do multiple data cleaning moves, like removing incomplete cases and making variables the same case, at once. It is not very complicated I will admit, but it makes life a little easier when you are first starting with your data.

For my weekly “reading”, I chose to listen to Episode 6 of The Test Set, which is a podcast focusing on Posit and interviewing different people in the data science community. My episode was titled “Michael Chow: From psychology and Python to constrained creativity”. Chow discussed his journey from a degree in psychology to a career in data science. Throughout my time at Bucknell, I have noticed that this is a common pipeline. Not psychology specifically, but my friends in a variety of majors have to take statistics or data science classes. A few have ended up acquiring a Statistics minor or even major because of these classes. The reverse is true too. Chow discussed how statisticians get to “play in everyone’s backyard”. I came to college knowing that I wanted to have a statistics major, but I was not set on how I wanted to use it. Once I realized how many options I had, I decided to focus on how statistics can be applied to marketing. To me, this is a way to still do the math I enjoy while applying it in a creative manner.

In my past newsletters, I talked a lot about how you have to design visualizations with your audience in mind. Since statistics are found in such a variety of fields, each visualization has to keep that in mind. Your visualizations will look different for a biology research audience versus a business centered audience. In Bella’s latest newsletter, “Cats, Code, & Coursework”, she discusses the episode of The Test Set that she chose to watch. It focused a lot on not oversharing when in speeches and on answering the question the audience is asking. 

With statistics slipping into so many different fields, this question is constantly changing. To effectively share your information, you have to know what will be seen as important to the audience. A room full of board members for a business might not care about how a study was done, but they would care about what advertising techniques or products are most profitable. On the flip side, biologists would want to know that a study was properly conducted so as to not compromise data.

So far in Statistics and Data Science Consulting, our only audience has been each other, and while I found all of the different things squirrels were doing when spotted was interesting, I’m not sure most professional audiences would. Similarly, over the past week while I worked on my package, I only thought about what I wanted. I am my own audience in this case, and I wanted pink and Taylor Swift. Since each of us is our own audience for this project, we will each get a unique package that in some way represents us.

Now, in a few weeks when we move on to working with clients, our audience will change greatly. We will have to put much more effort into making clear visualizations and focus on answering the questions they want. This class teaches us to be consultants for specific problems, not to snoop through the company’s data to find all of the issues they have.

In a way, we can all take lessons from Taylor Swift (Yes, I found a way to focus my newsletter back on her). Swift knows that her fans like to go on scavenger hunts and discover easter eggs about what she will do next. So, when she is releasing new music that is what she does. Sometimes it is word scrambles, other times props in the back of an interview, or even just an emoji on a social media post. If we take into account what our audience is looking for as much as she does, we will keep them interested and engaged with ease. Well, that’s all for now, I have a rehearsal dinner to attend and new Taylor Swift music to listen to.

Until Next Week,

Aylee and Binksley