Club Overview
Illini Statistics Club is an RSO which brings together undergraduate and graduate students who have an interest in statistics to build a community fostering skills and career development. Illini Statistics Club hosts four types of events: career development events, skills development events, social events, and datathons. Interested students are welcome to come to our events and check us out!
Contact Info:
- Email: Illinistats@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/illini_statisticsclub/
Type of Events
Career Development Events
Career development events make up the majority of Illini Statistics Club events. During these events, company employees typically present general information about their company, how they use statistical methods to meet their company’s goal, give example projects using statistics, and what opportunities are available with their company which use statistics-related work. Career development events are a perfect way to learn what skills companies look for in applicants and to see how what is talk in the classroom is enacted in businesses. Furthermore, career development events give students the opportunity to determine if they are interested in a company’s work and a good venue to make connections with company representatives. Feedback received from club members has shown that club members especially appreciate career development events because they learned about internship and careers with companies and were able to mention the company employee they talked to on their application. Past event examples: Capital One, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, State Farm, Akuna Capital, Ameren, Deloitte
Skills Workshop
Another type of event the Illini Statistics Club hosts is skills development. Skills development events are run by an expert in a statistical programming language or software. These workshops typically run for 1-2 hours and are aimed towards beginner to intermediate level users. Attendees are encouraged to install the software being used before the event to follow along with interactive examples, although this is not required. Skills development events are a great way to learn the basics of a program and its capabilities. Past event examples: R Workshop, Python Workshop, Linux Command Line Workshop, Tableau
Social events aim to cultivate a sense of community among Statistics students. They aim to allow students to engage one another and form lasting friendships. Our club is mainly development-orientated, but we do provide these opportunities for our members to expand on friendships outside of the classroom. Past event examples: Illini Union Bowling, Illini Grove Cookout, Ice Skating
Datathons
Datathons provide students with an opportunity to handle real-world data and gain experience cleaning, coding, analyzing, and presenting results. Datathons are a new addition to Illini Statistics Club list of participating events. In Spring 2017, Illini Statistics Club hosted the Monsanto Datathon in which over 50 students participated in teams of 2-4 to provide the best analysis of a dataset in 24 hours. Since then, the datahons organized by the Illini Statistics Club have grown in size to over 300 students participating in the event with new sponsors, including Synchrony, Sandia National Labs, Bayer, 3M and more. Since 2017, the Illini Statistics Club also has also sent teams of students to participate in the Midwest Undergraduate Data Analytics Competition (MUDAC). In Spring 2017, an Illini Statistics Team received 2nd place in the competition!
Current Members
Club members are from different majors and different colleges in the university. All majors, as well as Freshman-PhD students, are welcome to join Illini Statistics Club! Below is a major distribution of the current members of our club:
