Welcome, Intro, and Setup

About Me

A headshot of Dr. Theobold from the second floor of Building 25, facing Mount Bishop. Dr. Theobold is rocking a pink blazer to compliment their pink hair.

  • Grew up in Grand Junction, CO

  • BA in Stats & Economics: 2014 from Colorado Mesa University

  • PhD in Stats: 2020 from Montana State University

  • 2020 - now: Professor of Stats at Cal Poly

  • My research: Statistics and data science education, R programming

  • Things I like: Spending time outside (e.g., running, hiking, biking), travelling, going to concerts and musicals

Syllabus tl;dr

Grade Brakedown

  • 5%: Check-Ins – Questions interspersed throughout lecture

  • 10%: Lab Activities – Lab attendance is required

  • 25%: Weekly Assignments – due Mondays at 5pm

  • 15% each: Exams in Week 5 and Week 10.

  • 30%: Final project

Important Dates

  • Thurs, February 5: Exam 1 (in-class)

  • Sun, February 15: 1-page Project Proposal Due

  • Thurs, March 12: Exam 2 (in-class)

  • Saturday, March 14 (before Finals Week): Final Project Poster Presentations

Homework Late Policy

  • Two deadline extensions: Fill out the form on Canvas before the deadline, get an automatic 2-day (48-hour) deadline extension.

  • If you’ve used your deadline extensions, late work has a 10% deduction per day. Late work is accepted up to 5 days after the deadline.

    • This policy also applies to deadline extension requests that are not submitted before the assignment’s deadline.

Discord and Email

  • Class questions go on DISCORD

  • Use my email only for personal concerns that you want to talk about privately to me.

Setup

Colab Notebooks

  • In Data Science, everyone uses Notebooks, not scripts, for coding.

  • We will be using Jupyter Notebooks (invented at Cal Poly!), hosted for free by Google Colab.

  • If you want to work offline, you can install Anaconda on your laptop.

  • I recommend an IDE like PyCharm (or Positron) as well.

The Brave New World of GenAI

Academic Integrity

  • If you copy text from a website into your essay, it’s cheating.

  • If you ask your friend to write your essay, it’s cheating.

  • If you pay someone else to write your essay, it’s cheating.

  • If you ask GenAI to do your work and then copy the answers, it’s cheating.

Conversation, not copying

It is okay (in fact, encouraged) to …

  • Ask GenAI for tips on how to get started on a coding problem

  • Ask GenAI to help find bugs in your code

  • Ask GenAI to help explain concepts or functions

  • Pretend ChatGPT is a tutor or a TA!