I Earned College Credit

By Danielle Fournier
 

Mr. Gerard asked us in his opening blog for the year to post about what we did this summer. I had a great time spending part of my summer at Carleton College where I earned college credit in Quantitative Reasoning. The program integrated math and statistics with major social sciences: political science and international relations, economics, and psychology. There were three Carleton professors teaching the program and the students were broken into groups of about 15 to each work with one professor. From those groups we were broken down into smaller groups to tackle a major project in addition to taking daily classes and working on small projects with each of the professors and some upper level Carleton students. 

My team designed and engaged in a research project exploring the effect of dropping out of college on income, as compared to people who graduate high school but do not attend college. We also took into account the impact of race on the results. I hadn’t had a statistics class before this program and I had a great time learning to understand statistics and analyze data. It turns out that I really enjoy statistics.  I was nice to be part of a group of students where everyone was excited about math.  In case you are wondering, our group determined that college dropouts earn 17% more than high school graduates per year and race does not affect those results. We presented our analysis and results in writing and in a public presentations, culminating at the end of the program in an oral exposition of findings using text, figures, and graphs. This school year I am taking AP Statistics and using a lot of the skills that I learned during the summer program. Also, I am definitely planning to apply to Carleton and some other liberal arts colleges next year.  

Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12