A New Way to Visualize Statistics
Meet math major Simon P. Couch ’21
Major: mathematics
Hometown: De Soto, Kansas
Thesis adviser: Prof. Kelly McConville [math]
Thesis: “Wiggling Thoughtfully: Tidy Stacked Ensemble Modeling with R”
What it’s about: The first part of my thesis is a software package implementing a statistical modeling technique called ensembling. In the actual “thesis” part I argue that statistical software is not simply the intersection of mathematics, statistics, and software engineering, but is subject to its own intuitions and practices.
What it’s really about: How can I write a math thesis with as little math as possible?
In high school: I spent a lot of time making folk music, playing sports, and working for a landscaping company. I was prone to writing bad songs and thinking pretty narrowly about what education was.
Influential class: Profs. Kelly McConville and Andrew Bray introduced me to data science and statistics, to academic research, to London and San Francisco, to open-source software development, to the thought of graduate school. Their warm welcomes to new intellectual worlds changed the course of my life.
Influential book: Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention changed the way that I think about race and science as an institution. Race is a political tool that creates and justifies inequality, hijacking the language and cultural power of the scientific enterprise to legitimate and reify itself. Scientists have a responsibility to call out technologies that assume and reinforce harmful understandings of race and racism.
Concept that blew my mind: Trees in the Pacific Northwest. They’re crazy.
Cool stuff I got to do: Thanks to a combination of grants, I flew out to London for a week to present some research on data privacy. I drove the vans and tagged along for hikes and mountain biking with the Outdoor Club most weekends my first year; played basketball with a goofy bunch of students, staff, and faculty on my lunch breaks; and worked as a tutor, peer career adviser, course assistant, house adviser, software developer, van driver, and student researcher.
Awards, fellowships, grants: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Goldwater Scholarship, John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, First Place American Statistical Association Undergraduate Statistics Research Project, Science Research Fellowship.
Challenges I faced: Early on at , I often felt academically unprepared compared to my classmates. The community shepherded me to the right people at the right times, and we made it work.
Help along the way: I’m grateful to have received extensive financial aid throughout my time at , including the Gregory P. and Diane LevKoy Morgan Scholarship, the Gillespie Family Student Research Fund, and the Paul K. Richter Memorial Fund.
How changed me: I started to grasp at the importance (and challenge) of saying exactly what you mean. I learned what statistics was, and want to spend my professional life working on it. I have much less hair.
What’s next: I’ll be starting my PhD in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins.