Stata 2015 Conference

In late July, I got to attend Stata's conference in Columbus, Ohio. It was my first Stata Conference and I went as part of my professional development through my employer. Three of my coworkers also went to the conference and we got to meet fellow Stata users, Stata programmers, Stata employees, and best of all: Bill Gould & Nick Cox! 

Day 1: My very first interaction  while checking in to the conference was having Stata's Twitter and social media manager recognize that I tweet a lot about Stata. My day was off to a great start! I liked all the different presentations on various different fields and got to learn about Stata commands that I didn't even know existed. 

At the end of day 1, there was a dinner that most conference attendees went to, and we, for some reason, did not purchase dinner tickets. Big mistake. However, thanks to Stata's awesome hosts we got invited to partake on the dinner fun and it was the best decision ever. We got to sit at the table with Bill Gould, Richard Williams  (he has a great website), and Phil Ender (a former consultant at UCLA.) We also got to mingle with friendly Stata employees like Chris and Gretchen, who were the ones making sure the conference was going smoothly and who graciously invited us to dinner. Our networking with Phil was such a success that we were able to get a great seminar on missing data in San Diego last month.

Day 2: A continuation of very informative presentations. For example, did you know that there are a bunch of different color schemes available for charts and graphs (brewscheme)? Or did you know that you can use -display- to save locals? You can see an example of that on my post regarding parsing fitbit data:

local da: di %tdDay_Mon_dd,_CCYY dofc(r(min))

Overall a great experience! I highly recommend it. Not only did I learn a lot, but I also had a lot of fun. One of my favorite memories was discussing Stata's untapped market of Stata themed bed linens & pillow-cases with Nick Cox and my coworkers. This idea came up after asking Gretchen if they sold the Stata tablecloth (pictured below) in the Stata gift shop. They don't. We all said it would be nice to hug a Stata pillow at night (nerds, but hey I love it!)

View from the Hyatt in Columbus

With Gretchen of Stata

Coffee break with Bill Gould, the President of StataCorp

My coworkers and me with Nick Cox at dinner

I took the picture below while departing Chicago en route to Columbus, little did I know that this is where #Stata2016 will be held. Until next year, Stata Conference!