Quant Family Collective
Advanced quantitative knowledge is increasingly necessary to succeed as a researcher in psychology, yet many barriers exist to gaining the skills and confidence to conduct advanced statistics.
The Quant Family Collective is a new, cross-institutional mentorship and community network aimed at building knowledge and confidence in statistics among early-career psychology graduate students, started by PhD students Annie Maheux and Whitney Ringwald.
The Quant Family Collective seeks to provide mentorship, informal learning opportunities, networking, consulting, and a supportive community for graduate students and other early-career psychology researchers, with the goal of building expertise and confidence in quantitative methods. We are particularly interested in supporting researchers who are underrepresented in quantitative fields, or those who otherwise are combating stereotypes, who struggle to overcome imposter syndrome when it comes to complex stats, or who may have a limited background in formal math education.
This is the first year of the Quant Family Collective, and we are focused on rolling out a mentorship program as our first initiative. We will pair mentors with 1-3 incoming first-year PhD students as mentees—these relationships will provide opportunities for mentees to ask questions, get access to resources, and process (and hopefully reduce) feelings of imposter syndrome or challenges inherent in learning statistics. The Quant Family Collective will also meet as a larger group ~4 times per year to participate in workshops and/or community-building activities. We hope that this first year will be an iterative process, with mentors and mentees contributing to the refinement of the program and eventually the long-term success and scaling up of the Quant Family Collective, so that we can grow our community and support more people!
To keep the program size manageable, participation for the first year is currently by invitation. If you are interested in participating or have questions, please contact Annie Maheux.
Mentors will serve for a one-year term (Summer 2022-Spring 2023).
Requirements include:
Be a current PhD student (2nd-year or above) or recent PhD graduate in Psychology. Expertise in statistics is not required, but you should be comfortable conducting quantitative analysis in your field, and be able to provide statistics-related support to your mentees (e.g., providing emotional/social support related to challenges of learning statistics, offering stats-related resources, answering basic statistics questions and pointing mentees in the right direction for further learning)
Commit ~2-4 hours each month to the program, including meeting with your mentees or with the larger Quant Family Collective (for workshops and/or group meetings)
Mentees will participate for a one-year term (Summer 2022-Spring 2023).
Requirements include:
Be an incoming first-year PhD student (or otherwise early-career researcher in search of support and mentorship), ideally enrolled in an introductory graduate statistics course in the fall
Commit ~2-4 hours each month to the program, including meeting with your mentor or the larger Quant Family Collective (for workshops and/or group meetings)