Washington University in St. Louis OLIN BUSINESS SCHOOL Eli Snir Lecturer in Management December 2013
Business at the intersection of art and science is epitomized in the Managerial Statistics II course. As we progress through the course, we realize that statistics is not only a set of mathematical concepts; it is also prone to questions of judgment and interpretation that are commonplace in the social sciences. No wonder that this is a ubiquitous tool among university faculty. The capstone of the Managerial Statistics II course is developing a term paper. Students choose a topic to study and demonstrate how regression analysis applies. The choice of topic is unconstrained. One of the goals of the course is to demonstrate the broad applicability of statistics, and specifically of regression analysis, to any area of interest. And the term papers reflect that. They are as broad and as encompassing as the university, drawing on nearly every discipline taught here. As the course is at the intersection of art and science, so are the term papers. Students have two deliverables in the project. One is a rigorous analysis of the topic, proving their knowledge of the tools studied in the course. The second is a poster and presentation of their analysis to a broad audience. This book is a product of the latter. It is a collection of posters from the poster session in the Fall 2013 QBA121 course. The audience for the poster session is diverse, including undergraduate students, MBA students, advisors, faculty, and deans. Students are expected to explain their analysis to various constituents, some desire a qualitatively understanding while other challenge students on statistical methodology. Invariably, students in the course address all questions comprehensively and confidently. On the following pages of this book we collected a sample of the posters from the course. Hopefully, they convey the breadth of student interest and the depth of student learning. As you will see, statistics does apply to every discipline and every one of us.
Thanks for your interest,
Eli Snir Washington University in St. Louis, Olin Business School • Campus Box 1133 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 Tel (314) 935-6090 • Fax: (314) 935-6359 • snir@wustl.edu