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!). 

Referral Contest Winners!

Announcing our winners of the referral contest!

1. Michael P. 
2. Marissa H. 
3. Kassandra J. 
4. Shane P.
5. Lauren C. 

You're all gettting $20 Amazon gift cards! We'll contact you shortly. 

We'll be starting up a new contest in June, so stay tuned for more chances to win gift cards and prizes.

A Short Tutorial on DrawPlus

I posted this to the LinkedIn group late last week, and I thought I would also extend the tutorial over here. We often recommend the program DrawPlus for creating diagrams. It's intuitive, it's free, and it's easy to download.

If you'd like to give it a try, just go to the site and download the free version.

Then watch a short tutorial on getting started and saving images so you can paste them in your solutions.

Happy authoring!

Announcing Our Very First Google+ Hangout!

Today is a very special day for us here at the Chegg office because we're putting together all the pieces of our very first Google Hangout with experts like you. We really are so excited and grateful for all the work you do-- and students are too. So we want to make sure that your needs are also being met, that your voice is heard, and that you're continuing to be intellectually challenged by the work you do for us. 

Our very first Hangout will be a meet and greet, nice and simple. I am allotting an hour for the event on the second to last Friday in June (June 21), but if I hear enough from people that that isn't the best day for everyone, we can switch things around. Just let me know!

Here's how it works: you will receive a link to the Hangout along with a few questions that we'll go through to get to know everyone a bit better. It will be super informal.

Can't wait to connect all of you online and to get to know you better!

Sell Tickets Online through Eventbrite

Solutions Should Now Be Saved in .Docx Format Only

Hey everyone: This week's tip is a big one, as it will be going standard in the next revision of the guidelines:

Please save all files as .docx. Simple as that.

Luckily, this update will probably save you a step, since you can now save all files as .docx rather than converting to .doc.

Please make sure you use only this file extension for all files going forward!