Welp, I’m all finished. I graduated in May 2024 with Latin Honors, cum laude; and, more importantly received a very nice email from my Experimental Design professor, Dr. Ravi Ramaswamy, saying “Congratulations. It was a tough course with a tough mid term 2 and final. But you shined. Wish you all the best !!” It may have been a group email to anyone who finished with an A, but still, the small humanistic embellishments go a long way in sculpting my outlook of academia and his class. So, let’s get into my final semester!
Applied Multivariate Analysis, Intro to Experimental Design, and Independent Study Statistics were my technical classes; I graded and proctored Mathematical Theory of Statistics for a former professor of mine; and, also took a linguistics class on Invented Languages and a world literature class on Kafka. Studying Kafka through an academic monocle proved to be the most difficult to focus on as my usual enthusiasm for his writing was drawn out to explanations over the course of 3 hour blocks each week. What didn’t help was my professor who cut any after class interactions short with me while hanging out with his German studies students. Naja!
The repository is fully published, but GitHub is having trouble posting my final report as a PDF. So, it’s posted on my website here. It was fun this semester as I was able to build my own analytics into my version of Professor LuValle’s code. I did have some trouble articulating the promise of this project when it came to summarizing its efficacy, but research has to be honest, and research is research, not a ‘prove it’! I plan on writing more about it on my website.
It started redundant, then very difficult, then it clicked. The majority of this class went over, you guessed it, the design of experiments. How to set them up in an unbiased way, then test for differences among the data using ANOVA and regression methods. We would do calculations by hand, and in R, mostly for engineering word problems associated with a dataset.
I felt most disappointed by this class. Heading into it, I thought I’d enjoy the applied aspects and the professor, Doctor Harry Crane, who has an online presence, two books, a research publication website with no peer review, and teaches an online class on sports betting with other respected Chicago hustlers. They charge up to $9,985 for their all inclusive course on analytics.bet. My disappointment came from how theoretical it was and how little work it required. I finished with an A and missed more than half the class. We covered principle components in one class taught by the TA. I did enjoy the two exams however, they brought you through a Multivariate Analysis problem by hand from the first page to the last. I wish the homework was similar.
I’ve just realized all of my uploaded PDFs in GitHub are now “invalid”. My apologies.