In This Story
Statistics students and faculty can find Associate Chair Brett Hunter in his office with the door open most every day of the week, and this year, his dedication and many contributions to the department earned him the college’s Outstanding Service Award.
Hunter came to George Mason in 2016 from Colorado State University, and since 2020, he has served as the Associate Chair for Education. As associate chair, he has taken on many responsibilities that ensure the department’s smooth operation of student recruitment, advising, and teaching. Colleagues describe him as a team player and an excellent communicator.
Hunter readily admits that he is the one that students see when they have questions and concerns. “I am around a lot more often than other faculty. The students know to come see me if they have questions,” he said. Hunter shares many advising duties with the undergraduate director.
While his administrative service is diverse and impressive, what he enjoys the most about his work at George Mason, is teaching students. Hunter often teaches new or difficult courses that other faculty do not want to teach. This includes a wide array of classes ranging from software courses to regression courses, but also essential courses such as a university core course on introductory statistics (STAT 250) and its counterpart for engineers (STAT 344).
Hunter taught STAT 334 the first year it was offered and there were only three students enrolled. He doesn’t teach it anymore, but other instructors still use the course material he designed. He said, “I'm the kind of a person who likes to move around in the classes because I get bored if I do the same thing over and over, and over again. I also like sharing knowledge with others and getting them excited about statistics, which is often hard.”
To do this, he describes Statistics as a different way of thinking about things. He said, “I know when I was doing one of the university preview days a prospective student was saying, ‘Oh, I don't like math.’ I said that’s a good thing. Statistics isn't math. Of course, there's math involved....” Then he pointed to two peer mentors at the event and asked them how much math was in the exam they just completed. They said surprisingly, very little,
He finds that the most rewarding students aren’t always the easiest to teach, but this doesn’t discourage him. He said, he taught STAT 350 in the spring, which is the second-level intro course, for all non-majors, but towards the end of the semester, students were asking about possibly minoring in Statistics. It doesn’t happen often, but he said it’s gratifying when it does.