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Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Working Groups

Do you have research data waiting to be collected, cleaned, analyzed, or visualized? BYOD Working Groups provide structure, guidance, and accountability to help you make progress on data or programming components of your research project. Groups are formed quarterly.

The program includes:

  • In-person kickoff breakfast to meet your group and facilitator
  • Weekly virtual group check-ins
  • Access and referrals to learning resources to support your work
  • Additional meetings with RCDS consultants as needed

Groups of 4-7 researchers (Master’s Students, PhD Students, Postdocs, Professional Students, Faculty, and Staff) meet weekly with a RCDS staff member to discuss what they plan to accomplish on their research project, what progress they made in the last week, any issues that have come up or that they are looking for help with, and other challenges that arise in the process of doing research.

Program Benefits

Benefits include:

  • Help maintaining productivity and motivation on your project
  • Chance to de-stress, reprioritize, and refocus on the most relevant tasks each week
  • Support from a community of researchers who will celebrate your progress and help you with your research challenges
  • Get new perspectives on your analysis from other researchers outside your field
  • Practice communicating about your research to others outside of your field
  • Extended support from RCDS consultants beyond what’s available with an individual consultation

Expectations for Participants

BYOD Working Groups are designed to help researchers focus on the next step of their project, get unstuck quickly when facing obstacles, and make forward progress on their work. Working Groups are deliberately designed to not create any extra work for researchers – you should show up for a weekly check-in even if you made little progress on your project over the previous week. That being said, to be respectful to your group mates and the group facilitator, participants are expected to:

  • Attend the mandatory Kickoff Breakfast either in-person on the Evanston campus or through Zoom.
    See Important Dates” below for the day and time of the Kickoff Breakfast.
  • Attend weekly group check-ins on Zoom.
  • Ideally, researchers should attend all 8 check-ins, but sometimes unexpected illness or other personal emergencies occur. Because we all know that unexpected absences might occur, please do not apply to join a Working Group if you already know you will have to miss more than one check-in due to an expected absence (conference, presentation, vacation, etc.).
  • Email the facilitator if you cannot attend a weekly check-in.
  • Participate in discussions during weekly check-ins. No preparation is required, just a willingness to listen and share.
  • Make some progress on your research project over the course of the quarter. Sometimes the progress is not what you expected at the beginning of the quarter – challenges arise, your preliminary results lead you in an exciting new direction, you face unexpected demands on your time – this is all normal. However, BYOD is designed for researchers who are actively working on their project.
  • Have working knowledge of the coding language or tool you are primarily using.

Email Ritika Giri with questions. Keep reading below for important dates and sample projects, or click the button to apply.

APPLY NOW FOR Spring 2024 BYOD WORKING GROUPS

Important Dates for Spring

BYOD important dates for winter quarter
Friday, April 5
Applications Due
Tuesday, April 9
Kickoff breakfast on the Evanston Campus or Zoom, 9:30-10:30 a.m.
Tuesday, April 9
Tuesday groups begin weekly Zoom check-ins
Friday, April 12
Friday groups begin weekly Zoom check-ins
Tuesday, June 4
Final Zoom check-in for Tuesday groups
Friday, June 7
Final Zoom check-in for Friday groups
Friday, June 7
Wrap-up party (details TBD)

Sample BYOD Projects

To get the most out of BYOD, researchers should have a clearly defined project and adequate time to work on it during the quarter (this can range from 4 to 40 hours a week, depending on your role and whether or not this is your only active project). BYOD cannot accommodate participants who are looking to learn a coding language, but please visit our Training page for workshops and learning resources.

Examples of previous BYOD participants’ projects:

  • Building a pipeline to diagnose [a particular lung condition] in ICU patients. Characterizing the performance of the pipeline relative to other attempts. My tasks will be stitching together code written by many people into one cohesive workflow.
  • How does affect and coping change over 18 months in individuals recently diagnosed with [a particular disease]? Does participation in a well-being intervention affect these relationships? I will run growth curve models to determine the 3-way interaction effect between coping, time, and intervention treatment condition on different aspects of emotional well-being.
  • Studying intergenerational mobility in income in [country]. I will estimate a flexible child skill production function, which is a key mechanism for income persistence across generations. This quarter I will be finishing data cleaning and estimation using R and Python.
  • What is the effect of race and place on political behavior? I will complete a statistical evaluation of survey data to understand the relationship between race and place. I am using R to create logit models to predict vote choice based on these factors.
  • How can I show relevant information from EEG data at different time points surrounding a stimuli? Looking to explore possible data visualization choices and select at least one for inclusion in a manuscript. Would also love to streamline the processing pipeline and make it flexible for future studies.

APPLY NOW FOR SPRING 2024 BYOD WORKING GROUPS