About

Overview and Scope

The Methods Workshop is a grad student led series introducing various applied statistical methods and topics in statistical computing.

Our Primary Constituency / Who Can Attend

Our primary constituency is comprised of PhD students and faculty in the political science department at Columbia. All CU-affiliated graduate students and faculty are also welcome. Individuals not currently affiliated with CU who wish to attend should contact the coordinators in advance.

Meeting Logistics

See schedule. To stay in the loop, contact the coordinators to join the mailing list.

What should I bring? What should I prepare?

• Recommended readings: Approx. two weeks before each workshop, a set of recommended readings will be posted here and circulated via email. This covers essential theoretical reading and several applications so you get a sense of the method.
• Install software: You’ll also be instructed to install additional software or R packages. We assume everyone has R installed on their computer.
• Set up starter code and data files: About a day before the session, starter code and data files used in the computing practicum/demo will be distributed via the mailing list.
• Bring your laptop, charged, ready to go: For the workshop, we recommend participants to bring their laptops with requisite software installed, and the code and data ready to go so you can follow along. We highly recommend you set up a local filepath on your computer (not on the shared Dropbox) where you save a copy of active files for each workshop.

Expectations / Suggested Pre-Requisites

All graduate students in the department are welcome to attend the workshop series and learn. Workshops cover intermediate to advanced topics in applied statistics for political science, and will be conducted under the assumption that participants are comfortable with multivariate regression and basic probability and statistics; and have basic proficiency using R. We highly recommend those without these foundations to invest in these skills through coursework at Columbia.

Get Involved (!)

To get involved and to get added to the mailing list, contact the workshop coordinators.