I was fortunate enough to attend the YSC2019 in Canberra during October 1-2, 2019. I want to gratefully mention the registration scholarship from Statistical Society of Australia (QLD Branch) for supporting my registration to the conference. Also I am grateful to my PhD Supervisor and QUT for supporting my travel, stay and participation in the conference. My time in the conference was immensely enjoyable and filled with lots of knowledge sharing, networking and learning.

This is to mention that I always enjoy presenting my research works in Conferences and also am enthusiastic to learn from others in such wonderful platforms. I have attended few conferences till now in my research career, but I must emphasize that this particular conference, in addition to ticking all the boxes by having some great keynote speakers, having various talks from different fields of Statistics, well organized and planned sessions,  it had a touch of freshness and unique elements, which made the learning more fun.

The energetic fellow young statisticians in the organizing committee were very warm and welcoming and they did a tremendous job with organizing such a wonderful event. They brought some elements of surprise to keep us all engaged and involved in the conference. The Trivia night organized on the night before the conference was a great icebreaker, when we got to know some delegates of the conference even before the conference started along with playing the trivia quiz. 

The conference Dinner sponsored by ACEMS had some nice activities as well. Professor Adrian Barnett’s game of drawing a perfect normal curve by hand was a fun and enjoyable task to do along with a little contribution made by us to honor the women in Statistics by creating Wikipedia pages for some of them.

The BINGO cards provided in conference satchels really was a fun thing to see  how we are interacting with each other, expanding our networks, enjoying talks, asking questions and many other things. There were people shouting BINGO at the middle of conference was making things lighter and fun even when we are listening to significant and important research talks all day long.

Now if I want to talk about my participation in the YSC2019, well, I am the only one who gave two talks (one 12 minute talk and one rapid fire talk scheduled for 5 minutes) in the conference and also had submitted a video talking about my research project briefly (within 3 minutes). Though I didn’t win any of the prestigious prizes given as Louise Ryan Best Presentation Awards or the best two video awards, I enjoyed participating in YSC2019 in every possible way. I hope I will do better next time to win something!

I really enjoyed presenting some parts of my PhD project to a very appropriate audience, who mostly had knowledge of Statistics. Throughout the conference I felt at home to be amongst the fellow researchers or students from the same discipline as mine and sharing our research projects, knowledge and experiences seemed very valuable to me. In this conference I met many old friends from different parts of Australia and made new friends, some of them can be my future collaborators as well.

The scientific program of the conference was very well organized and almost all of the cutting edge topics of Statistics was covered and there were presentations from people of both Academia and industry, which made the talks more interesting. As an academic person, I got to know how industry people are using statistics in their problem solving tasks in a very different environment, which made me feel more proud to be a part of the Statisticians community. The four keynotes were very well suited and informative to learn from.  Teresa Dickinson, Deputy Australian Statistician, Australian Bureau of Statistics gave a nice overview of Official Statistics, different policy aspects of data and statistics, roles of ABS, the methodology used in ABS and many more. The second keynote speaker, Calvin Hung Data Scientist, QuantumBlack explained why it is a great time to be analytics using different examples and facts. The second day of the conference started with wonderful keynote speech by Alison Hill, Data Scientist & Professional Educator, Rstudio who taught us about art of literate projecting to be ready to sell our skills to future employers. She also talked about the different benefits of having our own websites.  The last keynote to end the conference was from Margarita Moreno-Betancur, Senior Research Fellow, VicBiostats, who talked about their research in causal mediation analysis.  There was also a career panel where we learnt important knowledge by hearing from successful Statisticians in different stages in their career. The panel chaired by Professor Louise Ryan also answered many specific questions from the audience and this was a very useful session for all of us, specifically for the PhD students like me, we got many valuable tips to think about our future career paths. 

I also have learnt so many things from the presentations from the Young Statisticians, learnt about many new fields of application people are working in. Some of the presentations expanded my knowledge on different types of method development going on for solving different issues.

Long story short, I enjoyed the conference thoroughly and I felt the organization of the conference was brilliant. A huge thanks to the organizers for their diligent efforts.

Farzana Jahan, PhD Candidate, Queensland University of Technology