Dr. AnnMaria De Mars is President of The Julia Group, a small company which provides on-line education, evaluation and data analysis in mathematics education, Indigenous education, bilingual education and disability issues. Seem like an odd mix?
When I was getting my Ph.D., we were required to have a couple areas of specialization. That was easy. I took every statistics course offered in the School of Education, and then went to the Psychology and Sociology departments to take more, specializing in Applied Statistics and Psychometrics. The Associate Dean patiently explained that I needed to have an area in Educational Psychology to do statistics on. I selected Severe Mental Retardation because there were a couple of projects funded at the university at that time which offered the opportunity to do a lot of interesting statistical analyses.
For the past thirty years, I have worked on projects that interested me, and they have fallen largely into these areas. Much of my work has been on Indian reservations in the Great Plains because that is where I ended up working right out of graduate school and I made a lot of connections there. For the past decade, I have worked more in southern California, where I live now, and Latin America, where I lived from 2018-19. Life is like that, how it turns out is a combination of deliberate choices and where you just happened to end up.
The Julia Group is a spin-off of Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc., my former company, co-founded with two partners on the Spirit Lake Nation. I started writing this blog 15 years ago, thinking I was going to semi-retire and just speculate about life. Then, I began posting problems I had solved in statistics, SAS and other statistical software, just to remind myself when I encountered the same problem later. In the interim, I have unsuccessfully retired twice. How unsuccessful? I “retired” from one contract and drove straight to the airport for a red-eye to the east coast to start the next contract. My second retirement was two weeks in the Bahamas before I got bored and came back.
If you are interested in consulting by The Julia Group, you can check out our capabilities statement here.