Since starting my MRes in STOR-i, I have learned a lot about Statistics and Organisational Research that I have never learned before. In the first six weeks of the term, I studied four modules:
- STOR 602: Probability and Stochastic Processes
- STOR 605: Inference and Modelling
- STOR 606: Stochastic Simulation
- STOR 607: Deterministic Optimisation
where STOR 602 and 605 were Statistics modules, and STOR 606 and 607 were Organisational Research modules. Having previously done a BSc in Mathematics, I had already learned about some parts of the statistics that we studied, but a lot of the content, such as Markov chains and stationary distributions, was very new to me. I had also never done any Operational Research before, other than the Simplex Method which I learned many years ago in my A-Levels, so I had the opportunity of learning a lot of new content in a very short space of time.
After doing these modules, I was able to apply what I had learned in the next module, STOR 608: Contemporary Sprint Topics. In this module, we were all presented with a 2-3 hour lecture about something new to us, and then we had to conduct research into the topic for the remainder of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning to answer some questions, and then present our findings in a 20 minute presentation on the Thursday. The topics of these sprints were:
- Optimisation Under Uncertainty
- Computational Statistics
- Modelling Paradigms for Complex and Novel Data Forms
- Statistical Learning for Decisions.
Through the sprints I was able to vastly improve my presenting skills, and I now feel much more confident in giving presentations to people. I enjoyed getting to work with my cohort and to see what ways of working and researching are good for me, which I will be able to apply when I do more work in STOR-i.
If you have any questions about what I did in this period of time, feel free to drop a comment on this blog!
