Eric’s Enlightenment for Tuesday, April 21, 2015

1. The standard Gibbs free energy of the conversion of water from a liquid to a gas is positive.  Why does it still evaporate at room temperature?  Very good answer on Chemistry Stack Exchange.
2. The Difference Between Clustered, Longitudinal, and Repeated Measures Data.  Good blog post by Karen Grace-Martin.
3. 25 easy and inexpensive ways to clean household appliances using simple (and non-toxic) household products.
4. A nice person named Alex kindly transcribed the notes for all of Andrew Ng’s video lectures in his course on machine learning at Coursera.

How to Find a Job in Statistics – Advice for Students and Recent Graduates

Introduction

A graduate student in statistics recently asked me for advice on how to find a job in our industry.  I’m happy to share my advice about this, and I hope that my advice can help you to find a satisfying job and develop an enjoyable career.  My perspectives would be most useful to students and recent graduates because of my similar but unique background; I graduated only 1.5 years ago from my Master’s degree in statistics at the University of Toronto, and I volunteered as a career advisor at Simon Fraser University during my Bachelor’s degree.  My advice will reflect my experience in finding a job in Toronto, but you can probably find parallels in your own city.

Most of this post focuses on soft skills that are needed to find any job; I dive specifically into advice for statisticians in the last section.  Although the soft skills are general and not specific to statisticians, many employers, veteran statisticians, and professors have told me that students and recent graduates would benefit from the focus on soft skills.  Thus, I discuss them first and leave the statistics-specific advice till the end.