On October 26th, the QMSS Peer Mentor Team hosted a roundtable event with all the Graduate Student Instructors from the QMSS courses. The four GSIs are Hannah Kraus from QMSS 201 and Shayla Olson, Priyanka Panjwani, and Sierra Voigt from QMSS 251.The roundtable was set-up for students to hear about the various educational and career pathways the GSIs had before they joined the QMSS program. The event, which was attended either live from the QMSS space in Weiser Hall or virtually, provided a great opportunity for students to get insights on how a QMSS minor can help them and what they might do with it in their future careers.
Peer mentors (and QMSS minors) Sarah Childs, Lily Klienknecht, and Hallie Zlotnick began the event by asking questions of the GSIs, some of which they, themselves, wrote and others of which had been sent in by students. The discussion first highlighted the wide range of backgrounds the GSIs have. Currently at UM, Priyanka and Hannah are both public policy students in the Ford School, Sierra is studying higher education, and Shayla is working on her Ph.D. in political science. A notable difference was that, while the GSIs all had extensive educational experiences, they have had very different jobs and amounts of work experience. For example, Sierra taught high school math for seven years while Priyanka worked for the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Their different work and educational trajectories emphasized that quantitative analysis and data skills are valuable and applicable in so many settings and careers.
The GSIs also answered student questions about what they can do with their QMSS minor and how to take advantage of the skills they learn through the QMSS curriculum. The GSIs emphasized the advantages of knowing how to use Excel, R, and Tableau, all of which are taught in the 201 class. They also provided students with insights into how they can leverage the labs we do in class by talking about them as mini projects during job interviews. Skills taught through QMSS, they argued, will give students a leg-up in the workforce due to the fact that grappling with an increase in data is becoming common in every field. The interdisciplinary nature of QMSS was also highlighted as it extends the connections students can make and the multitude of fields they can work in.
The Peer Mentors found the event to be very successful with good student turnout, and they definitely plan on hosting similar events in the future. The next event is a workshop with the opportunity hub to help QMSS students with updating their resumes and preparing for job applications.
