Community corner: Teaching with Stata
Are you teaching with Stata this fall? Whether you're heading to the classroom or working remotely from a home office, we know that this year brings new challenges. And we look forward to working with you to tackle those challenges.
In this Community corner, we highlight Professor Ling Cen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has been teaching with Stata since 2013 and shared his experience in switching to virtual learning with us.
Professor Cen teaches behavioral finance courses and has found Stata to be an indispensable teaching tool. His students come with widely varying levels of programming ability, and he notes that it is essential that Stata is both powerful and easy to learn. Specifically, he writes:
"Among all common statistical packages, Stata is the best for students with very different programming backgrounds: Stata is very easy to pick up for students with no programming experience at all; at the same time, for students with extensive programming experience, Stata provides sufficient flexibility for them to develop their own codes and ado-packages."
Because of this, for the last seven years, Professor Cen has been utilizing Stata in his courses to implement trading strategies based on behavioral-factor-driven market anomalies.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Cen needed to keep his class running virtually in the same way that it ran in person. StataCorp worked to provide all the finance students with access to Stata remotely. Professor Cen shared that this allowed students to "design, test, and present trading strategies online as if we were in the finance lab."
Professor Cen also shared feedback from his students in regard to their Stata training. Students from his undergraduate behavioral finance class told him that "the Stata programming skills [they] acquired in [Professor Cen's] class would make a big difference in the job market. Especially when the job market ahead is expected to be a very tough one."
We are grateful that, like Professor Cen, so many of you choose to teach with Stata, and we look forward to supporting you and your students. As you begin this academic year, be sure to visit our Teaching with Stata page to see a variety of Stata teaching resources and to download our Stata cheat sheets for students getting started with Stata.
