Students’ experience of becoming a statistical consultant

Abstract

Developments in computer software have made it easier to carry out statistical procedures, leading to a widespread use of statistical outputs in many fields. However, the need for statisticians, and statistical consultants in particular, has also increased, since the numbers and graphs that can be easily obtained from packages need to be interpreted into meaningful information. We can help statistics students to develop the required professionalism by giving them opportunities to work as statistical consultants while they are still studying: we were able to do just this in two recent offerings of a final-year ‘capstone’ unit of study. As part of their summative assessment, students wrote reflections on the process of applying their previous learning to a range of research and consulting problems. In this paper, we use these reflections to discuss students’ experience of becoming (and being) a statistical consultant.