The Statistical Consulting Center (SCC) hosts a team of faculty, staff, and graduate students from the Department of Statistics who offer professional advice on how best to obtain, analyze, and interpret data. The SCC was established to:

• enhance the academic training of statistics graduate students with practical problem-solving experience
• provide statistical advice on research projects, and
• increase collaboration among the statistics department faculty and other researchers.

Each year, we receive more than 100 written requests for consultation. We also serve the Penn State University community by offering open office hours to researchers. Our services are available to all Penn State faculty, research staff, and graduate students working on research leading towards a thesis or dissertation. In addition, we offer services to clients external to the University system. It is our aim to collaborate with researchers early in the project so that we may offer input on how to:

• set up the study
• manage the data, and
• analyze the data.

The majority of our projects are classified as short term with graduate students in STAT 580 serving as consultants. First, the student consultant meets with the researcher requesting help to discuss the project's statistical challenges. With the support of the SCC consulting staff, the course instructor, other class members and faculty members, the student consultant prepares a recommendation report. Within two weeks, the student consultant meets again with the researcher and presents the recommendations. The consulting service, offered free of charge to Penn State graduate students, is available throughout the year.

The objective of STAT 580 is:

• to provide statistics students with practical consulting and communication skills, such as how to present results verbally and in a written report, and
• how to work cooperatively with other researchers.

In addition, we hope that graduate students from other disciplines will find this service beneficial to producing more scientifically rigorous research.

The SCC also engages in three forms of long-term consulting. Statistics graduate students can choose to work on a long-term project for a semester. Students have worked with the following colleges:

• Agriculture
• Business Administration
• Education
• Earth and Mineral Sciences
• Health and Human Development
• Liberal Arts, and
• Medicine.

In addition, the SCC interacts with interdisciplinary groups such as the Center for Locomotion Studies (CELOS), the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC), and the Acoustics and Bioengineering programs.

Undergraduate statistics students work with long-term consulting projects through the required course STAT 470W. Researchers in these projects tend to be undergraduate students working on senior theses. These students have assisted students from the fields of agriculture, education, human development, and economics.

Finally, SCC consultants work on long-term consulting projects, often multiyear projects that involve exciting research. The SCC offers graduate assistantships in consulting to students who have completed a year of graduate consulting course work. Several assistantships are shared between the SCC and the Population Research Institute, as well as with other research centers.

At times, questions or problems brought to the SCC present research challenges for the faculty and consultants. Although the methods and tools exist to handle most statistical problems, occasionally a researcher will raise a unique question that creates the need for new research into statistical methodology.