Many of my clients have reported to me that their advisor recommended they hire a statistician to help with their dissertation. I am curious to know how many of you out there have had this happen. In my view, statistical consulting benefits both the doctoral student and the mentor. Often times the mentor has limited experience with statistics.
Since it is the mentor’s responsibility to insure that the student has handled their statistics properly, it is to the mentor’s benefit knowing that the student had the help of a professional statistician. The student benefits because they will know their statistics were handled properly, and they will learn far more about statistics than they are likely to have learned on their own from reviewing their statistics notes, textbooks and doing Google searches.
