Biostatistics Consulting Guide/Reflection

This past Fall 2025 semester, I had the opportunity to enroll in PH 246 Biostatistics Consulting under the guidance of Dr. Alejandro Schuler. I had Professor Schuler as my academic advisor and I always wanted to get more experience with consulting, specifically technical or somewhat capacity of biostatistics and public health. As I was going through the semester, there was a lot of experiences and reflection as I was understanding more about consulting and the clients needs. I have done a consulting class before back when I but that was more of working with a client’s project or dataset for a semester and performing various analyses and providing insight on the data for future work. I did like that I was being exposed to different subjects and subfields as that gave me more knowledge on things that I didn’t know originally. Overall, the experience of consulting was great as it pushed me to communicate well and also help understand the clients needs in their situation and hear from their perspective. Of course, there were things that I did not understand or know and I would like to give a perspective on a guide that I feel would be beneficial for other future students who will take this course.

First, I think the reality is that you, the consultant, is not going to know everything that the client is asking for. In the beginning, I felt bad when I would deal with clients and their specific works and not have an understanding on their specific project. But truthfully, that is ok. I was nervous when I was going through my first consulting sessions and trying to understand the subject matter. I think what’s more important is not just knowing specific subject matter, but how do we listen to our clients’ work and understanding, and how to create inferences and find out about what they are asking about and looking for. To be explicit, I think being able to have the client explain their project and give details and resources about their work is beneficial because as it makes you listen carefully and practice on attention to detail, you have the ability to ask specific questions that can be important. I think asking a lot of questions can help with getting an overall view of the project as they know more and the client has been working on this for months, even. For example, what was the research question? What data did they have? What were the types of variables in the data? Was it continuous, categorical? What was the suggested analysis? Was there a misunderstanding on the method that they were using? How did they interpret the data or how did their PI interpret it? These are some specific details that can be beneficial with adaptivity of each client but also just being open-minded in the learning process. There was one client who was confused on the used of interaction terms within her table 1 and I had to teach linear regression and interaction terms just for clairty and understanding. There is a patience component to doing this class but also how can you use your resources to help you better understand this.

One of the things that I took away from this was as you go through different clients, you learn as you go and you start to gain knowledge and ideas based on past experiences. Therefore, you will learn as you go through this course not only in the classroom, but also with each client’s project. In addition, I think it is important that you look back on your own experiences, as that can play a part of which methods you want to use too. Going in depth with this, I think clients appreciated not only that you were listening to their projects to get an understanding on what they are doing, but also how to research on these different topics looking at specific methods or r packages and looking at papers or literature that explains these questions or related topics. When I had a client that scheduled an appointment with me during my time, I would research and investigate before the appointment at their specific topic and the question they were looking at, review some materials I discovered that I felt could’ve been helpful and give it to them as a resource. And after hearing more about their project and asking follow-up questions, I would research more into that topic to try to understand and give my interpretation and follow up with resources and suggestions. I enjoyed following up with the clients as it was a reflection for me on what I have learned and to learn more about the subject as I now have more information from the consult. And the clients were able to appreciate the time that you took for researching their materials, providing resources and suggestions based on that material, and summarizing what was talked about to give clarity and understanding. This opportunity gives us the chance to learn more on topics we do not know about and provide ideas based on past experiences and asking questions. I had to research more on causal inference methods, mixed effect models, GEE, and other multilevel modeling techniques based on my research and what the client was doing too.

Overall, I did not have any expectations or ideas of how this course would go for my first semester doing this class. My inclination was that we would get a project or dataset and go analyze and speak with a single client for a whole semester. But, I did like this method of having appointment hours and dealing with different projects is beneficial as it helps to learn more on different subjects and communicating on a subject you have barely knowledge of. I think the communication aspect and making the client comfortable is an important skill to have and develop as you will be dealing with different people with different educational and professional experiences. I also do think as I learn from the client and how they are the expertise, I learn from them not only from their projects and experience, but also from their communication and interpretation of their data or visuals. I think just having the ability to learn, listen, and research are key factors of not only being successful in this class, but also growing as a person as we go through different experiences we want to implement our perspective when in reality, we are serving the clients and their needs. With having them better understand of their project from their session shows growth and potential ideas and how the aspect of learning is always their. Don’t feel discouraged about asking questions or not knowing everything. Having patience and resilience can go a long way and having a hunger for learning something new. After taking this course, I do want to continue learning and grow as a student and as a person with my work and projects and help in any capacity as a consultant.