We brainstormed things that we know now that we wished we had known in high school. During the first year, we just made courses out of those (also borrowing from CFAR workshops) and rolled with that, because we didn’t really know what we were doing and just wanted to get something off the ground.
Over time we’ve asked ourselves what the common thread is in our various courses, in an attempt to develop a more coherent curriculum. Three major themes are statistics, programming, and life skills. The thing these have in common is that they are some of the key skills that extremely sharp quantitative minds need to apply their skills to a qualitative world. Of course, it will always be the case that most of the value of SPARC comes from informal discussions rather than formal lectures, and I think one of the best things about SPARC is the amount of time that we don’t spend teaching.
We brainstormed things that we know now that we wished we had known in high school. During the first year, we just made courses out of those (also borrowing from CFAR workshops) and rolled with that, because we didn’t really know what we were doing and just wanted to get something off the ground.
Over time we’ve asked ourselves what the common thread is in our various courses, in an attempt to develop a more coherent curriculum. Three major themes are statistics, programming, and life skills. The thing these have in common is that they are some of the key skills that extremely sharp quantitative minds need to apply their skills to a qualitative world. Of course, it will always be the case that most of the value of SPARC comes from informal discussions rather than formal lectures, and I think one of the best things about SPARC is the amount of time that we don’t spend teaching.