Saturday, June 23, 2012

Data Discovery

Today was a good day for mentoring. Teaching students the power of discovery is never easy. They have to have some passion, a little bit of creativity, and some imagination. There has to be some time pressure. They have to learn how to explore on their own, to make sense of the data, and to display it in obvious and intuitive ways ... to know the data well.  They must take ownership of the data set. If there is something wrong you must trust them to find it so it doesn't interfere with your analysis.