CUQM POL6 PRIZE WINNER
Congratulations to Jamie Popplewell (Queens College) who has won the CUQM/SAGE prize for joint highest mark in the 2018 POL6 (Statistics and Methods in Politics and International Relations) exam paper. Jamie has won £50 worth of books from SAGE publishers.
Jamie has offered his reflections of POL6:
"My two years at Cambridge have been some of the most interesting of my life so far, and a large part of this has been down to the quality of education I’ve been lucky enough to receive. Although the other papers I have taken so far have been interesting, POL6 has particularly stood out to me due to the variety it introduced to my second year. Instead of spending all my time reading highly theoretical texts, the Pol 6 paper enabled me to develop more practical skills such as using the programming language ‘R’ to run statistical tests, and then to interpret the outputs in a critical way. This, along with the teaching, I found notably engaging as well as being useful for my other papers (which had readings of a quantitative nature which I would have no doubt shied away from without the knowledge and confidence I gained through this course). I also hope it will be useful going forward when working on my dissertation and eventually in my career. Although I am not sure yet what I want to do when I graduate, knowledge of the assumptions and research methods underlying the statistics that are often quoted in the news and academia will no doubt give me a more critical eye which can only be a good thing."