Hedge fund uses Harvard Extension School distance education class as backup training

Spotted in my Google blog search RSS feed: David Kane of Kane Capital Management -- a company that operates a hedge fund -- requires summer interns from Williams College to have a solid grounding in statistics. If they are unable to take the appropriate course at Williams, he has them take Government E-2001 ("a course [that] gives you the tools to build statistical models and useful in real social science research") through the Extension School's distance education offerings. He pays, too.

This is one example of how distance education at Harvard has potential applications beyond enabling Extension School students to take coursework online. Some of these high-quality classes can be used for workforce education in certain fields. Conceivably, these classes could also be used as substitute for-credit at other colleges or universities that don't offer such courses, offer them infrequently, or need to serve students who are not on campus because of a disability, military service, overseas study, etc.

The class that Kane refers to looks quite interesting. While Government E-2001 is "recommended" for government concentrators, it is not required, and I have the feeling that a lot of Extension School students aiming for a government ALM shy away from taking it, considering they already have one difficult requirement to get out of the way (the graduate proseminar) and the fact it involves a subject that so many social sciences concentrators dread -- math. In my experience, very few people who are ALM Government or History concentrators like math or attempt to use quantitative methodologies in their theses. Others may not realize until it is too late that they want to use statistical analysis, instead of more traditional qualitative approaches.


In hindsight, I wish I'd taken this class (or one like it) before I started my thesis, which used a quantitative methodology to study Chinese foreign policy during the Deng Xiaoping era. While I had studied computer content analysis schemes during my graduate proseminar in 2003, I didn't have any training in statistics when I started my research in 2005 -- I basically had to do a lot of extra reading on my own, and get advice from my thesis director and a few others in order to develop my models and analyze the data.