QMSS is happy to welcome Hannah Kraus as a GSI for QMSS 201: Introduction to Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences this semester. Currently working towards her Master’s degree in Public Policy at the Ford School, Hannah received her B.A. in public and international affairs from Princeton University, where her research focused on European Union refugee and asylum policy.


Originally from Middlebury, Vermont, Hannah spent several of her formative years in the Czech Republic, and speaks Czech fluently. After high school, she deferred college for a year during which she volunteered and worked her way through many European countries including the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. “In London, I worked for Save the Children International, my first full-time office job. I learned about the work that a large international NGO does while helping to organize a conference in Mexico, with senior leadership from 30 different country offices.”


During college, summer internships continued to provide unique opportunities. In addition to interning with the U.S. Senate, Hannah interned for the Teacher Salary Project, reading through 50 state reports on educational inequities and assessing how low teacher salaries played a role. While with the Global Women’s Water Initiative, she helped to process and analyze survey data about the success of their programs. 


Before coming to the University of Michigan, Hannah worked for a school system in the Bay Area. As a data analyst, she focused on issues related to teacher performance evaluation and compensation. She also worked as a legal assistant for a criminal justice nonprofit that represents people serving life sentences in prison, and as an English teacher in the Czech Republic on a Fulbright grant. Reflecting on how these experiences relate to QMSS 201, she said, “I’ve seen how quantitative methods are used across a variety of fields related to public policy, through both my academic and professional career.”


As a University of Michigan graduate student, she was drawn to this GSI position and the chance to work with Beth Ann Whitaker, the instructor for QMSS 201. “I was immediately excited about the applied goals of the program, and the breadth of methods and tools that it covered.”  Already this term, the lab assignments have included learning many descriptive and inferential statistical tools in Excel and R, through pivot tables, charts, hypothesis tests, and regressions. Students have also learned best practices for data cleaning and data visualization, and have worked in Tableau to create interactive dashboard visualizations like geographic maps, barcharts, boxplots, and scatterplots.


“QMSS201 is a great course because it gives students the chance to develop a range of technical skills applicable to a number of fields that they can add to their resumes. Whether or not you’re interested in using these methods on a daily basis as part of your academic or professional career, being able to at least understand how to interpret the statistics and data you see around you is extremely valuable in practically every field.”


QMSS 201 will be offered again in the Spring 2021 (register here) and Fall 2021. If you would like to learn more about the QMSS curriculum, please click here.