STA/OPR 9750 - Mini Projects

In lieu of traditional homework, STA/OPR 9750 has a series of mini-projects designed to achieve several interlocking goals:

  1. Improve your skills at data analysis
  2. Improve your improve your ability to give feedback on data analysis work
  3. Seed a ‘portfolio’ of data science work you can demonstrate to potential employers

Each Mini-Project will be submitted via GitHub, an industry-standard code management platform, as both raw analysis code and as a HTML document hosted on GitHub pages.

After each Mini-Project is submitted, 2-3 peer reviewers will be assigned to give feedback and to assign an initial grade following an instructor provided rubric. This feedback will be given via GitHub Issues.

In order to ensure good peer feedback, the peer feedback will be evaluated by the instructor in a “meta-review” worth a small fraction of the overall grade.

If you believe your mini-project has received inaccurate peer feedback, please contact the instructor directly within 48 hours of the peer feedback deadline. No student-initiated requests for re-grading will be accepted after that time, though the instructor may re-grade the work during the meta-review stage.

Mini-Projects

Mini-Project #00: Course Set-Up

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-08-29
  • Initial Submission: 2024-09-11 11:45pm ET
  • Peer Feedback:
    • Peer Feedback Assigned: 2024-09-12
    • Peer Feedback Due: 2024-09-18 11:45pm ET

In the ungraded Mini-Project #00, there is no data analysis required, but you will set up the basic web tooling used to submit projects #01 to #04.

Note that, even though ungraded, Mini-Project #00 must be completed to remain enrolled in this course and before any other Mini-Projects can be submitted.

Mini-Project #01: Fiscal Characteristics of Major US Public Transit Systems

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-09-12
  • Initial Submission: 2024-09-25 11:45pm ET
  • Peer Feedback:
    • Peer Feedback Assigned: 2024-09-26
    • Peer Feedback Due: 2024-10-02 11:45pm ET

In Mini-Project #01, students will investigate the fiscal characteristics of US public transit authorities. In this project, I handle the data import and tidying; students are mainly responsible for “single table” dplyr operations (mutate, group_by, summarize, select, arrange, rename) to produce summary statistics.

Mini-Project #02: TBA

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-09-26
  • Initial Submission: 2024-10-23 11:45pm ET
  • Peer Feedback:
    • Peer Feedback Assigned: 2024-10-24
    • Peer Feedback Due: 2024-10-30 11:45pm ET

Mini-Project #03: TBA

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-10-24
  • Initial Submission: 2024-11-13 11:45pm ET
  • Peer Feedback:
    • Peer Feedback Assigned: 2024-11-14
    • Peer Feedback Due: 2024-11-20 11:45pm ET

Mini-Project #04: TBA

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-11-14
  • Initial Submission: 2024-12-04 11:45pm ET
  • Peer Feedback:
    • Peer Feedback Assigned: 2024-12-05
    • Peer Feedback Due: 2024-12-11 11:45pm ET