Serving the Community Through Discipline-Specific Consulting

Abstract

Discipline-specific consulting has a critical place in any university as a form of community outreach. For example, when government and nonprofit organizations need objective information for decision making, a university-driven consulting program providing free services can fulfill their needs. We show how this can be accomplished by describing a project completed by Statistics in the Community (Statcom), a graduate student–run organization at Purdue University. Statcom helped the city of West Lafayette, Indiana, develop and analyze the results of two community surveys. We use this as a case study to illustrate the multiple benefits of implementing such an engagement opportunity at any university and argue that discipline-specific consulting should play a major role in university outreach. This case study also illustrates how students can be utilized to fulfill a university’s engagement mission.

Department(s)

Mathematics and Statistics

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2007 University of Georgia, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2007

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