Expert of the Month: 5 Facts About Statistics Author Jill Schmidlkofer

Today, we are rolling out a regular monthly feature on the blog, Five Facts About.... Each month, we'll ask an expert five questions about themselves. They will be known as our Expert of the Month. Want to be profiled? Simply shoot us an email and we'll send over a template for you to fill out. We want a chance to get to know each of you better and for each of you to have a chance to get to know how awesome everyone here is. I believe in the power of random connection, and this is just one more way we can make those connections happen for you. 

Without further ado, I bring you one of our exemplary experts, Jill Schmidlkofer!

FACT 1: What is your area of expertise?

Statistics – I got my M.S. in 1974, when Statistics was practically in its infancy. (I took a Multiple Regression course using a four-function calculator.) Now I feel like a rock star because Statistics has gotten almost sexy. 

FACT 2: What is your workspace like?

A lawn chair in the living room, with a gel pad. There's a big basket under the computer  table for Buttons the Cat. Very cozy. My window looks out on the lake and the golf course. Heaven on earth.

FACT 3: What do you do when you’re not authoring textbook solutions?

Sleep.

FACT 4: Tell us something exciting that has happened in your life this week!

My granddaughter smiled and cooed at me. She is 6 weeks old. There's space in Buttons the Cat's wicker basket for her when she comes for a visit.  I don't think Buttons will like sharing. 

FACT 5: Why do you like working with Chegg?

I like working for a company whose name is recognized by virtually everyone under the age of 25. The company is vibrant, forward-thinking, and its vision is inspiring! Carrie and Ryan do a spectacular job taking care of all of us solutions authors. That is the best part of the job, besides the paycheck.

SOMETHIN' EXTRA: And, because Jill always likes to go above and beyond, she's offering her one top trick for solution authoring: 

I always re-read my solutions just before I send them to Carrie. I look for typos, format errors, delimiter issues (!), hanging indents, boxed answers, and separation of steps in the problem solution. I make sure that, if I did a copy/paste from an earlier problem with a similar solution, that I have changed all the numbers to those in the current problem. I re-read the problem holistically to make sure that the flow of the explanation is good. It takes maybe a minute or two per problem, but it pays off big time. I usually make some kind of change to about 80% of the problems when I do this review.  

Find Jill on both Google+ and LinkedIn. She is an excellent resource for authoring, telling amazing and hilarious stories, and offering encouragement and ideas. I think we all wish we had someone like Jill to teach us statistics (I know I do!). 

Templates: The Secret to Writing Quick, Quality Solutions

One of the most effective ways to write quick, high-quality solutions is to create your own template for your work and fill it in with each subsequent problem. We've spoken to our most efficient and highest-scoring authors, and they've all said that they do some variation of this. Maybe the bulk of the solution cannot be cloned, but at least you can have ready the key elements of a solution and duplicate them over again to maintain consistency and quality overall. But first, what are these key elements of a good solution? We need to know that first and create the skeleton of the solution in each template.

Key Elements of a High-Quality Textbook Solution:

1. Introductory sentence. This can be short and just sums up what is being asked in your own words. This gives your solution a clear direction. 
2. If needed, a diagram to set up the problem. Point out the relevant areas in the diagram and label with Times New Roman size 12 font.
3. Set-up problem-solving tactic. Briefly describe how you plan to work through the problem. The textbook you're working from may specify a specific procedure. Make sure you review the worked out solutions in the book. 
4. Individual steps separated by delimiters (single lines). Steps should be direct and not get off track. You don't want to confuse students with unnecessary information. 
5. A conclusion that re-states the answer in a full sentence. 
6. A box around the final numerical answer. See how to do that in our blog post on the subject.

So you can see that you could easily have a template at-ready with your heading setup, delimiters in place, and a general introductory sentence in place. Once you have one top-quality solution, why not duplicate that quality over and again?

We highly recommend you create your own template that fits your style and your text. But to get you started, we'll link you to some of the best solutions we've seen in physics, statistics, engineering, and business. If you find these helpful and want to see more, just email me or Ryan. We'll be happy to set you up with templates. We may even have one for the book you're working on! Imagine all the time saved! Imagine all the money earned! 

• A Business Template (This is for a matching problem and can be used for any discipline): Here. 
• Several Engineering Templates in One Word Document: Here. 
• A Physics Template: Here. 
• A Statistics Template: Here. 
• A few levels of math templates can be found in another blog post: Here.