A capstone course for undergraduate statistics majors

Many undergraduate statistics students receive limited exposure to real data and the challenges of real data analysis. To help improve our undergraduate program at the University of Georgia, we developed a Statistics Capstone Course. The course has three main threads: (1) teaching advanced/modern statistical methods to undergraduate statistics students; (2) giving these students an intensive, year-long data-analysis experience; and (3) providing the students with an opportunity to improve their written and oral communication skills. In this article, we describe the philosophy behind the Capstone Course, detail its implementation, and informally evaluate the success of our endeavor.