Volunteer Research Opportunities

[statdude13]

Are there any volunteer research initiatives for statistics that one can join to help garner experience in the field?

 

My idea was to approach MS or PHD students in stats for help with their research/projects but I don’t know if this is appropriate or feasible lol. As a result, I began searching for other ways one can help out pro bono but cannot find any.

 

Does anyone know of any statistics related volunteer opportunities? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Just an fyi this would be for later down the line when I have more stats courses/languages under my belt because right now I would not be of much use to anyone but I’m a work in progress haha. 

Edited June 20, 2013 by statdude13

[wine in coffee cups]

I think you'll have a hard time finding graduate students in statistics who can make use of you for research help. The main types of work grad students want to outsource are things like manual data entry and cleaning, nothing very statistical. You'll probably find more opportunities for that outside of statistics in areas like economics, psychology, and ecology.

 

You could look at Kaggle.com competitions to get some practice. I don't think it'll mean much admissions-wise but it will be good experience for you.

[Igotnothin]

I think you'll have a hard time finding graduate students in statistics who can make use of you for research help. The main types of work grad students want to outsource are things like manual data entry and cleaning, nothing very statistical. You'll probably find more opportunities for that outside of statistics in areas like economics, psychology, and ecology.

 

You could look at Kaggle.com competitions to get some practice. I don't think it'll mean much admissions-wise but it will be good experience for you.

 

I agree with this, and I would also add epidemiology to the list with economics, psychology, and ecology. Epidemiology is basically just applied statistics, so you would learn statistical software and get a feel for what statistical methods are appropriate for various types of data. Also it's way easier to produce publishable work in epidemiology than stats.