What's in a name?

As you can tell from our web pages we are the Statistical Consulting Group of UCLA Academics Technology Services. Some of the parts of our name are obvious, such as, UCLA. But the other parts may need some explaining.

"Statistical Consulting Group" -- as this part of our name suggests, we provide statistical consulting for UCLA faculty, staff and students. We provide services to campus members engaged in research. We do not provide direct support for students enrolled in statistics or other methods classes, that is, we do not assist students with homework or course projects. On the other hand, we do not charge campus researchers for any of our services, that's right, its totally free.

We have three major modes of providing our consulting services. First, we have walk-in consulting sixteen hours per week. People show up during consulting hours and receive assistance on a first come/first serve basis. On an average day we will see about a dozen clients. Our second mode is email consulting. Campus clients send in questions via email and if we can understand the question, we email a reply within one working day. If we don't understand what is being asked we can reply asking for further clarification or to ask the client to visit us during our walk-in consulting hours. When clients visit us, we ask that they bring their data with them so that we can work on their data with them. Our final mode is our web pages. We try to put up pages that cover many of the common questions and/or problems that our clients encounter. Our web services are very successful, generating nearly one million hits per month, split almost equally between campus and non-campus URLs.

"Academic Technology Services (ATS)" -- this part of our name requires a little explanation. The former name for ATS was the Office of Academic Computing (OAC). It was the campus computing center. I started at UCLA back in the mainframe days. At that time OAC was running an IBM 360 model 91 which later was swapped for an IBM 3033 and finally an IBM 3090. Just about all the statistical computing on campus was done on the central mainframe. The big stat packages in those days were BMD, SAS, SPSS. Since all this software was run centrally it made sense to have centralized statistical consultants. In fact, the vast majority of the "stat" questions concerned the JCL (Job Control Language) needed to statistics software and use tapes and disks.

As the computing environment on campus changed from centralized mainframe systems to distributed departmental and individual systems, it became clear that the name Office of Academic Computing was no longer a good fit for what the organization did. The name change to Academic Technology Services better reflects the breath of services that are currently provided. One of these services is statistical consulting. So even as computing has become decentralized, statistical consulting has remained an important component of a centralized unit, providing service to the entire campus community.
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