Students anxious about taking their first statistics course hope to have a professor with ample amounts of compassion and patience. UMM’s newest member of the Statistics discipline, Jong-Min Kim, fits the bill.

“I understand students’ struggles with statistics. The English language was difficult for me and I had to work very hard to master it,” he recalls.

Kim grew up in Korea, where English is not often spoken. But as the youngest of four children, he knew he was the one willing to take an adventure into the unknown in search of a more promising future.“I finished my masters in mathematics in Korea but I wanted to come to the United States for my PhD,” he recalls. “The job market in Korea is bad.”

So he accepted an offer to work on his PhD and teach at Oklahoma State University. However, the very different world he found in Oklahoma took some adjustment. Kim admits he was afraid to go outside the first day. But he managed to overcome the obstacles of learning a new language and adjustment to a very different culture. He laughs to recall an incident that occurred during a vacation he took to reward himself for surviving his first semester at OSU:

“I went to California and visited Los Angeles. There are many Koreans there. I went to the biggest Korean grocery store in the country there. I bought a big, big bottle of Kim chi sauce At the airport, I was told the bottle would have to be a carry-on. I put it in the storage compartment above my seat but the cap must not have been tight. Soon, everyone in the plane could smell the Kim chi. Oh, their eyes were watering, and babies were crying and people were complaining and I told them to please just throw it away. But the smell lasted for the whole trip!”

All culinary disasters aside, Kim continued his studies and travel while he was in Oklahoma. Along the way, he switched from mathematics to statistics. “Math is very interesting but it’s not my right way,” he explains. “I saw that people in math were always in their offices studying, working. I wanted to also have a social life.”

As a statistics major, Kim found he had time to become the president of the Korean students group at his school. He is still close to the friends he made in that organization and finds time to visit them during holidays. UMM was the first institution to offer Kim a job right out of graduate school. He feels a great loyalty to our college for giving him a chance to fulfill a lifelong dream; to be a teacher.

“The students here are good,” Kim observes, “and they work very hard. I am lucky to work with Jon (Anderson) and Engin (Sungur) in this new statistics discipline. More students are becoming interested in statistics.”

One new component to the Intro to Statistics course Kim teaches is an opportunity for students to use real-life statistics in their homework assignments. They gather on-line US Census data and use it to create excel programs that make demographic comparisons. Data from Steven’s county, such as income averages, can be compared by age, race, education and other demographics, for example.

In his own research, Kim studies alternative survey techniques to get truthful answers. For example, surveys sometimes ask very sensitive questions, such as "Do you use cocaine?" or "Have you ever shoplifted?" or “Did you understate your income on your tax return?"

“These are all questions that ‘yes’ repondents could be expected to lie about,” Kim notes. “A question form that encourages truthful answers but makes people comfortable is desired.”

Two previous statistics researchers developed the idea (and variations of that idea) to randomize survey questions to encourage truthful responses. For example, a surveyor can instruct a respondent to flip a coin. If it’s heads, the person answers the question “Did you use cocaine in the last week?” If it’s tails, the person answers the question, “Is the second hand on your watch between 0 and 30?” The surveyor does not know how the coin toss turned out, so cannot know which question is being answered. Statisticians develop complicated versions of this idea and the formulas needed to analyze the data. Kim has come up with several new approaches to this randomized response technique and has recently published several papers on his research.

Kim is eager to continue his research and teaching in Morris and has already brought his young niece and nephew to Morris for a taste of life in the U.S. He wants to let them know that adventures can be scary but also very rewarding. “Should I have followed my father’s advice and stay home in Korea?” he asks. “No. I am stronger now. America has the potential to make you a bigger person.”

[editor’s note: Kim chi sauce is an ingredient in a fermented cabbage dish and its ingredients include pungent fish, hot peppers and garlic].