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Joseph K. Blitzstein — Professor of the Practice in Statistics and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Statistics department — has taught STAT 110: “Introduction to Probability” since 2006, when the enrollment was 80. Since then, it has grown sixfold, becoming the third-largest course at Harvard this fall. (The class has essentially become a rite of passage among sophomores interested in an applied STEM field.)
In addition to teaching Stat 110 and various other courses in the Statistics department, Blitzstein co-launched Harvard’s first data science course in 2013 and a new, no-prerequisite data science course in 2020. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and advising, including the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching, which “honors exceptional teaching in introductory science courses”; students have also voted him a “Favorite Professor” in the Harvard College Yearbook 11 years in a row.
Blitzstein has always been popular, but during the pandemic, he has become something of an online phenomenon. Talking to current students about him, I heard the same theme over and over: In a time when communication is difficult, inequities are exacerbated, and students are isolated, Blitzstein feels the pulse of how students are doing in a way few professors can.
Posts on Harvard Confessions — an anonymous Harvard College message board — praising him and his classes are often the most popular content on the page. A much-liked post on the Facebook group “Overheard at Harvard” shows a screenshot of a text message saying “Who is joe blitzstein and why does everyone love him so much.” “Those posts are essentially a Joe fan club,” says Rachel X. Li ’23, a former Stat 110 student and current teaching fellow for the class.
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Blitzstein frequently comments on students’ Facebook posts with advice and support. “There was a confession where my friend tagged me, and he’s like, ‘I’m currently dying for Joe in [Stat] 210.’ And Joe responded, ‘It’ll make you stronger. I won’t let you die,’” Li says. Li also tells me about a post where a student mentions how they were unable to find an advisor for petitioning for an internship as an independent study course. “My internship was supposed to start this September, and I’m not even sure if it’s possible,” the student wrote in their post. In Blitzstein’s comment on the post, he told the student to email him, offering to advise them.
Stat 110 has 462 students this fall but, as Li tells me, Blitzstein is actively trying to meet with every student in the class. The week after the midterm, he set up seven hours to dedicate to one-on-one meetings. After they filled up within ten minutes, he added more meeting slots. “He’s one of only a few bits of Harvard that we’ve gotten to keep [during the pandemic],” Natalka A. Bowley ’23 says. “Like, Blitzstein is a Harvard standby. A lot of people look forward to meeting him as part of the Harvard experience. The fact that he’s made such an effort to let us get to know him means a lot.”
On Facebook, Blitzstein has also contributed original statistics-related memes to the popular undergraduate group “Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens.” FM chatted with Blitzstein on Zoom about teaching during the pandemic, advising, Harvard Confessions and, of course, memes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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AMC: What it was like to move one of the school’s largest classes online? What were some specific decisions that you had to make, and how did you make these decisions?
JKB: It’s something I thought about a lot. Last semester was a good test run, when Stat 111 had 200 students, and Neil Shephard and I had to put it online within a few days’ notice. I was talking to a few students over the summer who had not taken 111, but whom I had known from 110 or elsewhere, and some of them were telling me all kinds of horror stories about how awful that the spring was for their courses after it went online. And I felt really bad about that. But I also wanted to understand as much as possible about what went wrong.
We had more time to think about 110. We created a Slack, and Ed, which is kind of similar to Piazza. We tried to make sure that the TFs and students would have iPads, and Harvard was helpful in creating a program like that for courses with a lot of technical writing. I also tried to build some additional flexibility in terms of deadlines into the course — a balance between a pretty accommodating set of policies and some structure and deadlines to keep progress going.
So lots of little things like that to try to reduce stress levels, but not watering down the content. Because it’s an important prerequisite, not only for other Stat courses, but for a lot of other courses in other departments. I still wanted as best I can for the students to learn the same amount of material that they would have learned on campus.
AMC: I think Stat 110 is the biggest class of this difficulty — other big classes like CS50 or EC10 aren’t generally considered as difficult. And students come into this class from such varied backgrounds. What are some important considerations that you make when teaching such a big class, and making it useful for people from such different backgrounds?
JKB: What I try to do is structure the material in a way that it has interesting insights for everyone, but also doable for anyone who has met the math prerequisite and is willing to work hard.
I have many examples over the years where the students who did the best in the class only had Math 21a — or maybe even less — as background, and they have done way better than students who had Math 25 or some higher math class. And I think that the reason that they were able to succeed so much is through the fact that there are so many resources, practice problems, and awesome TFs. No matter how much math background you have, it should be possible to do very well with enough effort. That might be a large amount of effort, but it still should be within reach and reasonable.
And another thing I do is always pay attention to the common mistakes, so I can emphasize and warn about some of those things.
And then I try to make up problems that are just really, really interesting, so that the students will not only enjoy working hard on the problems, but also feel like they had a rewarding piece of insight or learned something that’s going to be useful to them in the future.
AMC: I remember when I was taking Stat 110 two years ago, one of the really important parts for me was going to office hours and being able to work with people. I’m wondering how in big classes, especially during the pandemic, how can we better help students in a situation where collaboration is a lot more difficult — and make sure that in these situations, teaching and learning can be as equitable as possible.
JKB: I’ve done a bunch of things in setting up the course to try to help with that. We have Slack and other places that we made available to help students find other students. In previous years, section attendance was highly recommended, and not required, and it was always just, you know, choose whatever section you want to go to and you just go.
This year I didn’t want to go as far as saying, here’s your assigned section that you must go to. But I thought that there would be more value than in a typical year to having a sort-of semi-assigned TF. So we ended up doing a survey. A couple other TFs and I thought about different algorithms, and we recommended a section to each student, and we said, we encourage you to attend this recommended one, but if there’s some good reason why you want to do a different one instead, that’s fine. The advantage there with many students attending their recommended section regularly is that the TF for that section can really get to know the students, and the students in the section can really get to know each other.
We’re trying to proactively check in on how students on doing. We’re also using breakout rooms fairly regularly in section, and I think a nice aspect is that students who didn’t already have friends in the class can collaborate together in sections. We’re trying to create as many opportunities as I can think of to help students get to know each other, as well as the TFs and me.
AMC: What are your main considerations when you’re advising students?
JKB: I think sometimes there’s too much of a tendency for advisors to just say take whatever you’re interested in and not be concrete. I’m not shy about saying my own opinions, positive and negative, about certain courses. Of course, I’ll say that it’s just my opinion and what I’m basing my opinion on. Since I advise a lot of students, I hear a lot about what they liked and hated in different courses.
A lot of it is a backwards-design type thing. I try to understand, what are the students’ goals? So it’s not just grad school versus industry, tech company versus finance. There’s a bigger picture goal of what you really want to do with your life after you graduate. And then the more I can understand that, the more I can try to work with the student on trying to work backwards. It’s like solving a maze, where sometimes it’s easier to start at the end then backtrack, and then figure out what you should be doing right now to make that future goal possible.
AMC: Do you have time for a few fun questions?
JKB: Yeah, of course.
AMC: How have the last eight months been for you? What has your quarantine been like?
JKB: I’ve been very busy. It’s been an extremely weird time for me, as well as for just about everyone, but I’ve been trying to go out on a lot of walks at Fresh Pond. And I’ve been trying not to look at the news too much, because it’s scary news every day, so I’ll go out on a walk to stop thinking about the news for a while.
AMC: Your memes on the Harvard pages on Facebook are among the most-liked content on these pages. I’m wondering how you come up with these memes.
JKB: I enjoy reading other [memes]. If an idea comes to me and if I feel like doing it, then I just do it. Do you consider Overheard at Harvard to be memes, because that’s just quotes? Did you see the quote that I had that was just empty quote marks?
AMC: And that got, like, 1000 likes.
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JKB, laughing: That has to have some record for number of likes per character, but I don’t even know if I’m going to post on that page again because I don’t even know what to say after that anymore.
To me, that totally captured the sadness and poignancy of that moment, when everyone suddenly was being sent home to wherever they had to go. I live in Cambridge, so I’m not far from campus, and I’d walk around, and it was just really sad and deserted. So I have an empty quote because I hear nothing, and I was really crying when I posted that.
I’ve had other memes where it’s more a fun thing, where I saw certain memes, like in a certain genre, right? I don’t know if genre is the word, but you’ve got different genres of memes that I might enjoy. And I think, oh, this is, you know, a natural example from Stat 110 that fits that genre.
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AMC: Oh, I wanted to ask you about AirPods, because your AirPods meme is my favorite meme that you’ve posted. What’s the best part about AirPods?
JKB: I used to always have earbuds where the wires always got tangled in my pocket, so I like that there’s no more tangles. I like listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and I go on a lot of walks, and it’s really nice having those and not being tethered to the phone, or have everything tangled up.
AMC: Yeah, I got AirPods when quarantine started, and they have been so nice. I love them.
JKB: Yeah, me too.
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AMC: What has it been like to read student sentiment on Harvard Confessions during the pandemic?
JKB: I found that it’s a very good way to stay in tune with what sentiment is like, and that’s something that I felt for years, that Harvard should have better places for that. Some could be anonymous, and some not, but better discussion forums so that you can see how everyone in this community is feeling, even in normal times. For eight years, I’ve been thinking, why is there no place where we can hear what people are experiencing? Harvard Confessions certainly has been a nice place to have some of that expressed.
It has its own biases, because you don’t know what sample of Harvard students or Harvard affiliates are there. It presents one lens, but I think it’s very helpful just as a way of seeing what people are feeling — not only in a time like this, but in other years too. There’s always some sort of crisis or problems. There are always things that could be done better, so there should be more places where people can talk, anonymously or otherwise. I think it’s a great thing if there are more forums for that.
AMC: How do you feel about all the praise you've been getting on Confessions?
JKB: I don’t know why there have been so many posts about me recently, but it means a lot to me that there seems to be a lot of appreciation for my efforts to help in various ways in this very difficult year. I’m not surprised there have been posts with a range of heartfelt reactions to the Stat 110 midterm (it’s a challenging class for almost everyone!), and a few of the TFs and I used that as an additional place to offer some heartfelt advice. And I was going to say it feels a bit weird having so many anonymous comments about me, but then I remembered that I read hundreds of anonymous comments about me and my courses in the Q Guide every year!
AMC: I have one last question. What’s something that students would be surprised to learn about you?
JKB: In high school and college, I was very, very quiet and shy. You might think that now, I’m pretty outgoing and like to talk a lot, but I was actually a pretty quiet person. And I never really worked on overcoming my shyness, because I was happy with who I was. And you know? Somehow, toward the end of grad school and starting as faculty, I became a lot more outgoing.
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— Staff writer Alicia M. Chen can be reached at alicia.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @aliciamchen.
