in2scienceUK Week

in2scienceUK is an award-winning charity, empowering students from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their potential and progress to STEM and research careers. UCL is proud to be a founding partner in the scheme, and in July 2019, the Department of Statistical Science welcomed five Year 12 students for an inspirational week of learning that statistics is not, in fact, boring!

Placements in the mathematical sciences are a new venture for in2science and we were delighted to be one of the first departments to host students interested in maths.

The students, who came from in and around London, spent the week visiting various members of staff. We wanted the students to witness first-hand how diverse statistics as a subject actually is, and in doing so we were hoping to show them that statistics at university is a lot more interesting than what they do in school! They learnt some R with Elinor Jones and were able to use their new-found skills to build models with Tom Fearn.

Other highlights included learning about forensic statistics with Ardo Van den Hout, trying out some maths with Sam Livingstone, and discussing risk and disaster statistics with Katerina Stavrianaki. They even had a morning discussing statistics and crop genetics with Michael Scott – a researcher from the Division of Biosciences at UCL – who gave them a primer on genetics before showing how statistics is used in crop research.

For some of the students, the highlight was spending a morning at the Turing Institute with Franz Kiraly. The Turing Institute, which is housed at the British Library on Euston Road, is a very inspiring space. There they spent the morning discussing data science, and the students certainly returned to the Department of Statistical Science with even more enthusiasm for learning statistics.

We certainly changed the students’ minds about statistics by the end of the week – they all agreed that statistics was far more interesting than they ever thought possible. Intriguingly, they commented that statistics as a subject was completely different to what they perceived it to be. It’s encouraging that most of the students ended the week keen to study at least some statistics at university.

We’re looking forward to showing more school students just how great studying statistics can be, and why it’s so important to be statistically literate.