POL S 499: CAPPP Undergraduate Fellows
Spring 2025
M: 2:30-4 Savery 162
Professor John Wilkerson
Office Hours: M 1-2:20 (Gowen 112) Click here to schedule.
TA: Ian Callison
Office Hours Monday 11:30am-1:30pm
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. — Mark Twain
Welcome back!
The fun continues. You’ve made good progress but there's a good chance that you have more questions now than you did before you started analyzing your data. That's quite normal.
We have four main goals for this quarter.
The first is to assess where you are in terms of your project. The comments we recently shared should be the starting point for that assessment. This is an assignment due Sunday April 6.
The second is to continue building and applying your understanding of quantitative analysis. You've had a taste of regression analysis, The next step is to become an informed user. Labs will be an important part of the first part of the quarter for this reason. Attendance is expected!
The third is to prepare for the Research Symposium on May 16. We only meet once a week so the two or three preceding class sessions will be about practicing for the symposium, whether you are presenting at a panel or the poster session. This includes preparing an effective slide deck or a poster. Everyone will be providing feedback!
Finally, you need to complete your final paper for submission at the end of the quarter. Ideally this is something that you work on over the quarter (eating the elephant) as we hoped you would last quarter. This needs to be a polished product and will be graded accordingly. We are always happy to provide feedback.
Grading
60% Final paper including data, and commented code allowing for replication
20% Labs and assignments ,
20% Participation/Attendance including Research Symposium Prep and Participation
Important deadlines/ timetable (week of)
Monday March 31 - Project status sharing, R Markdown and Stargazer
Sunday April 6 – Assessment of questions to be resolved and next steps for your research project
Monday April 7 - Subsetting vs. interactions; Visualizing regression results using predict.
Monday April 14 - TBD
Monday April 21 - What makes for a good presentation?
Monday April 28 First set of practice presentations
Monday May 5 Second set of practice presentations
Monday May 12 - Final review of presentations and posters
Wednesday May 15 - Submit final Mary Gates PPT Files
Friday May 16 - Mary Gates Research Symposium - invite friends and family?
Monday May 19 - Debrief!
Monday May 26 - No class
Tuesday May 27 - Share Replication files and data with partner
Friday May 30 - Share Replication report with partner
Monday June 1 - Draft of final paper due (or earlier)
Sunday June 8 - Final papers due (this is the beginning not the end of finals week)