ICPSR Summer Program
Maria Ravlik's story about trip to Ann Arbor
Maria Ravlik (associate researcher at LCSR) took part in the first session of the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research in Ann Arbor. She wrote a short story about her trip to Michigan for the LCSR website.
The school I took part in is held every year by Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the Michigan University. The School is unofficially called “Summer Camp for Social Scientists” and celebrated the 50th anniversary this year. My first visit to the United States coincided with attending ICPSR Summer Program, and it was an important experience for me.
Lectures and workshops are taught by outstanding instructors who not only manage to gather more than a hundred listeners at their lectures, but also are very responsive to all questions and helpful to students. The Summer School program consists of intensive and incredibly interesting courses. The great advantage of the School is the ability to visit as many courses as possible during first few days and then decide which ones you want to attend for the following four weeks. I decided to focus on Regression Analysis III, Data Mining, and R Statistical Computing Environment. I also visited a couple of lectures for professional development (such as Writing Grant Proposals, Publishing in and Reviewing Articles for Professional Journals, Teaching Statistics, Using Data in the Classroom). My main course on regressions covered extensive topics including diagnostics techniques and solutions to common obstacles for estimation of linear models, namely non-linearity, outlying observations, and dependent data. The last part of the course was devoted to discussion of such topics as model selection, multi-model inference, finite mixture models, missing data, and multiple imputation. The labs organized during the course were also very useful in terms of conducting hands-on analysis of actual datasets.
The overall impression is that my course selection helped me to assess my models and present my results in a more systematic way, with using modern, data-analytic approach and advanced graphical tools.
The city of Ann Arbor, where the School takes place also left a very good impression. It is a typical university town with a well-known studying atmosphere. A lot of places including cafes, libraries and parks where you can seat with a laptop or a book dispose to studying.