The Highlander Statistics Society (HSS) has been a part of the University of California, Riverside (UCR)’s campus for a decade now providing math majors a space to get to know others in the field, explore career options and test their skills. These days the club finds themselves networking with businesses, preparing for competitions and finding a community for the mathematically inclined on campus.
Mahiyat Bhuiyan, fourth year data science major and co-president of the club explained that the club started as a way to showcase more math majors especially with the rise of data science applications. The HSS in particular, aims to showcase UCR’s Statistics Department.
Bhuiyan joined the club casually, but found herself getting more invested after participating in the annual statistics competition DataFest last year. She applied for a board position and became the co-president. Bhuiyan’s passion for data science started in high school, “Ever since I took AP Statistics, I’ve been really enjoying statistics, as well as …how it comes together with computer science to make up for data science. So I think …it’s been a long journey since I’m a fourth year now, but I still really enjoy statistics.” However, prior knowledge is not a requirement for the HSS as Bhuiyan described the club’s membership as being diverse with a fascination for statistics being the uniting factor.
The average club meeting is spent preparing for competitions such as the DataFest. Bhuiyan stated, “And essentially what our quarter is going to consist of is workshops on how to like scrollytell which is a data visualization platform, we’re also going to have study sessions towards midterms week and finals week, as well as socials. And then we plan on asking some professors to come in to showcase what they’re researching, as well as give students opportunities to research under them as well. And we also plan on doing resume building workshops.”
The club also does field trips to potential employers in the statistics and data science field, “The plan is to reach out to big companies that people are interested in, applying to for internships or full time roles and having them either come here and talk to us about their company, or if we are able to, rent out a bus or something, and [have] a bunch of us go and visit the company and get a tour of the entire place,” as Bhuiyan explained. The workshops that the clubs put on are mostly skill based, training students on programs like Excel and other data visualization platforms.
The club is currently preparing for UC Berkeley’s scrollytelling competition, where the club competes online as a team. They will be given a data set and will have to create data visualizations techniques as well as a website to showcase the data and help users understand what the data is telling them. DataFest by comparison can be compared more to a Hackathon where club members will receive a large data set and be asked to perform tests accordingly. These results are then presented to the judges as they progress through to different rounds.
Though the club has struggled to maintain membership over the years, Bhuiyan emphasized how the club atmosphere has continued to be close knit, “I would say just to bring a safe space for statistics, data science, math, computer science [majors], even a place for them to just really, grow their skills and not have such of a hardcore environment. I know we’re called Highlander Statistics Society, so it sounds very fancy, but honestly I think this year, especially me and Sumeda, my other co-pres, have been really trying to make it a safe space for students to just be able to grow without the pressures of the job market.”
The Highlander Statistics Society has shown engagement, commitment and passion. As a longstanding club on this campus it has earned its keep as a staple math club here at UCR.
