Workshop: Evaluating and Communicaing Impact

Join us for a free virtual interactive workshop and a glimpse into the curriculum of our Master of Science in Decision Making and Applied Analytics (MDA) and Certificate in Decision Making and Applied Analytics (CDA).

Effective leadership requires understanding cause and effect relationships, asking the right questions, and being able to identify reliable and useful answers despite real-world constraints.

We will begin this session by discussing how to ask rigorous causal questions that minimize ambiguity and maximize practical utility. We will then identify the challenges of inferring causal relationships from real-world evidence. We will explain why causal inference can often be confusing, and why common sense and intuition may not be enough to get to a correct answer. Lastly, we will examine a quantitative method of impact evaluation—synthetic controls—which has been called the most important innovation in policy evaluation in the last 15 years, and which demonstrates the potential for data visualizations to communicate complex statistical results and ideas to nontechnical audiences. We will work through examples and case studies from Minerva’s graduate curriculum and show you how our graduate programs can help you become a more confident and impactful decision-maker and leader.

‍Please note that this session will require attendees' active participation in order to effectively demonstrate our learning methodology. Due to the interactive nature of the event, we will not be able to record it.

Facilitated by: Alexis Diamond, Professor of Computational Sciences

We will share short pre-reading material for review before the session to facilitate active participation.