I'll explain what students are expected to do for the MSTAT project and how the process usually unfolds. This is also a good opportunity to ask any questions you may have about the MSTAT program, as well as meet other students and faculty members.

Extra Space is an S&P 500 company headquartered in Salt Lake City. They are the second largest self storage operator in the country. Katie is part of the team which builds and maintains systems related to pricing and paid search spend, and provides analytical support for other operational teams including CX and marketing. She will discuss problems they have solved around maximizing revenue and minimizing CPAs (cost per acquisition).

One of the common studies done in medical research, but without a lot of time spent in college courses, is the power or sample size study. Tools exist for simple cases, but as planned studies become more complex the tools either do not exist or contradict each other. This presentation will cover the basics of using simulations to do power/sample size estimates using examples from my work at Intermountain Healthcare and also show some additional insight that comes from simulating data for power rather than using simple, existing tools.

Early lifecycle software cost and schedule estimation is hard. Software intensive systems require people to develop millions of lines of software code. Mission and safety-critical software built for the Defense Department must work. However, even new software intensive systems tend to try to reuse software from past systems, using various computer programming languages, use newly formed software engineering and development teams, and geographcially dispersed teams among a host of other software development challenges. This colloquium will discuss some of these problems and an Aerospace Corporation developed cost and schedule analysis methodology that was used to assess contractor bids with their inherent risks for acquiring software-intensive US Air Force systems based on a Monte Carlo statistical analysis.

With constant evolving avenues of communication in order to enhance the customer experience we need to adjust our way of connecting with our clients. Before we can make this change we need to insure the company will survive. To do so, A/B testing is implemented to find the most effective way to communicate with our clients.

In this presentation, Dr. Carl Letamendi, Bureau Director, Utah Department of Health Office of Health Care Statistics (OHCS), will share about his personal journey from being a student first exposed to quantitative sciences as a field, taking on statistical positions, teaching gigs and consulting work, and how he positioned his experience and talent towards quantitative work, which led him to secure positions including analyst, research scientist, adjunct, non-profit cofounder, director of evaluation, primary investigator for a few funded studies, and now, as OHCS director. Having had extensive opportunities evaluating team needs, developing position descriptions, hiring for statistical work, mentoring and teaching quantitative subjects at the undergraduate and doctoral level, Carl will share best practices and tips to recent grads as they prepare to enter the field, which aren’t usually part of the statistics curriculum. These insights include, but are not limited to: winning people over during interviews, improving public speaking skills, networking, continual learning, celebrating successes and repurposing failures as opportunities.