This week it’s all about the numbers. Seth Rubin (Finance and Economics) talks baseball stats while Joe Servadio (Statistics, Math-Economics) discusses undergraduate sanitation habits.
Seth Rubin Market Efficiency of Major League Baseball Player Salaries: A Look at the Moneyball Hypothesis Ten Years Later”
What most excites me is the opportunity to combined a passion of mine in baseball statistics, and combine it with what I have learned and will continue to learn and get to write about it as a thesis. The most challenging part is finding the right statistics to use for my research and getting some of the pieces of data.
I am expecting to learn about Major League Baseball and how statistical analysis has and is still changing the way players are evaluated. My hopeful plans will be to work at either a financial services firm or with a major league sports team where I can use my data analysis tools to make a positive impact. And then eventually go back to school for either my MBA, Masters or even potentially a PHD. This will help me continue to grow my analysis skills that will help me wherever I end up.
Joe Servadio: “Comparative Risk of Undergraduate Sanitation Habits.”
The intent is to determine whether or not any interactions exist among the Knowledge, Beliefs, and Practices of undergraduates concerning sanitation habits. The habits I am isolating are hand hygiene and food safety, which focuses on produce storage and preparation.
So far, what I have found to be the most exciting part of my research is being able to conduct my own research project that has a practical application. I also was really excited to be able to create and conduct a survey that was sent to a random sample of undergraduates. My response rate was better than expected, and I’m really glad that I was able to collect a lot of data, which will make my results more precise.
The biggest challenge I am facing so far is the step that I am currently working on: the data analysis. My survey closed last week, and I am now in the process of sorting through all of the raw data and making it more usable. Many of the questions on my survey were multi-part, meaning that while something looked like 1 question with 10 different categories, it now to me is like 10 different questions that must be addressed individually. It’s definitely a challenge to take a huge Excel spreadsheet and find a way to make this data usable. What I hope to learn from this thesis is how to organize, plan, and conduct a research project. I hope that this will, even at the most rudimentary level, provide insight into a career in research. So far, I have found this to be a very positive experience.
I currently am applying to doctoral programs in Statistics with a research focus in health sciences. I think that writing a thesis in this topic is a good way to show graduate schools that I am currently involved in this form of research, and that I am capable of being involved in research.
