Free Consulting Services
E-mail Consultations
send stats | send math
Please use the e-help links above to request an email consultation. Most e-mails will be answered within one working day (messages received on Friday will not be answered until Monday). If you have multiple questions or complex questions, please schedule an in-person appointment rather than sending e-mail. If you do send multiple e-mails within a week, it may be several days before we can respond.
Walk-In Appointments
Location: 3.04 Painter Hall
The table below shows the current consulting schedule for Spring 2008. Appointments are 30 minutes long, but you may schedule back-to-back appointments if they are available. Click on the links shown in the table to read about the expertise and interest areas of the various consultants; this will help you to choose a consultant who best matches your areas of study and interest.
When you book an appointment on line, make sure to specify whether your preferred contact method is a walk-in (in-person) or phone appointment. If you make a phone appointment, we will call you at the appointed time.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00 AM - 12 noon | Basic Stats | Basic Stats | All Stats | ||
| 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | All Stats | All Stats | All Stats | ||
| 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM | All Stats | All Stats |
For more information about the consultants that handle each shift, see the staff page.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00 AM - 12 noon | |||||
| 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Math | ||||
| 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
For more information about the consultants that handle each shift, see the staff page.
Free Consulting Policies
We provide the following guidelines and information to facilitate the use of our services as well as to detail what researchers can expect, and what is expected of them, when using our free statistical and mathematical consulting services.
What We Do
SSC consultants can help you design your study, select an appropriate statistical or mathematical procedure, identify the various parts of your output, or interpret results. We can also recommend site-licensed statistical or mathematical software for your own personal computer, help you select the best package for your task, locate documentation, and interpret error messages.
Due to the demand for free consulting services, we can provide a maximum of 1 hour a week of free consulting – either by email or walk-in appointments.
For initial consultations, be prepared to detail your research questions and objectives and to describe characteristics of your expected data set (ifapplicable). If you are in the process of analyzing your data, you are encouraged to bring your data on disk or download it from Webspace so that we may demonstrate procedures in a familiar data setting.
Whom We Can Help- Consulting services are limited to the students, faculty, and staff of the University of Texas at Austin.
- Eligible student research includes undergraduate honors theses, masters theses or reports, dissertations, and articles for publication.
- We can also assist teaching assistants and instructors using most statistical and mathematical software packages.
We assist UT students, staff, and faculty with research oriented inquiries. Our role is to assist, rather than to conduct analyses for you. We prefer to meet with researchers near the beginning of their projects but are available for discussion at all stages or research, including:
- Research design
- Survey design
- Power and sample-size calculations
- Data management (data manipulation, formatting, coding)
- Selection of appropriate statistical or mathematical procedures
- Selection and use of statistical and mathematical software
- Data analysis and model selection
- Interpretation and reporting results
- Locating documentation and resources
- Creating graphs and tables
- Interpretation of error messages
- We do not assist undergraduate or graduate students with homework assignments or course projects.
- Our consulting operations use standard American English as the language of communication, and we do not have the resources or staffing for translation.
- We cannot assist individuals outside of UT.
- We cannot assist with projects involving NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), involving classified information, related to or likely to be involved in litigation, related to current partisan political campaigns (surveys and polling for a particular candidate, etc.) or commercial projects.
- Assistance with software installation and licensing is done through the ITS Help Desk rather than through the Division of Statistics & Scientific Computing. If you need assistance with software installation, then please see our FAQs, or contact the helpdesk at 475-9400 or help@its.utexas.edu.
- If you are a faculty or staff member who requires more than one hour per week of consulting time, you may wish to consider a contract, which will allow us to provide you with more intensive assistance.
If for some reason you need to cancel an appointment, then please contact us immediately so that others may take advantage of the unused time slot. You may cancel appointments by either contacting the Help Desk at (475-9400) or sending an e-mail to stats@ssc.utexas.edu for statistical consults or math@ssc.utexas.edu for mathematical consults. Please provide your name and the time slot you are canceling.