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Comprehensive Consulting for PhD Candidates
"Committee giving you trouble? Let us be your teammate..."
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Minimax Consulting is widely considered to be the premier statistical consulting firm for PhD candidates seeking dissertation assistance. Students frequently cite these reasons for choosing to work with us:
We offer personalized and comprehensive after-support via phone and email. We don't consider our job done until you are comfortable with the work. We are generally available via phone from 8am-8pm M-F and from 9am-5pm on Saturday. We can create PowerPoint presentations or other visual tools to help you, or can be available via Webcon for a 'live' consultation. We consider ourselves to be teachers, and not just doers.
NOTHING IS TOO COMPLEX FOR US. We can perform any statistical analysis, regardless of the complexity (and have never turned down a project due to it being too complex). We take on the projects that no one else can handle. Our clients often come from top schools such as the Ivies, Oxford, Stanford, etc. We have specialists in various areas (psychometrics, econometrics, methodology, mathematical finance, etc.), each with PhDs from elite Universities.
We don't merely "advise" you, instead, we participate in the preparation of your methods (ch3) and results (ch4) sections, and work with you until you understand them.
We are more reasonably priced than most other statistical consultants. We offer free in-depth consultations with prospective clients, so that we can quote you accurately. Our team approach, organizational size, and the expertise of our staff allows us to offer much lower fees than other statisticians. We have payment plans for grad students, and quote all of our work on a per-project (and not hourly) basis. You pay for results, not for time.
We have expertise with virtually every statistical software package, including but not limited to:
SPSS, SAS, Minitab, STATA, R, MPlus, SPlus, STATISTICA, and JMP for traditional statistics
LISREL, AMOS, and EQS for structural equation modeling (SEM)
MATLAB for simulations, bootstrapping, and neural nets
MATHEMATICA and MAPLE for pure mathematics
NVIVO, NUDIST, and ATLAS for qualitative work
We are highly recommended by the Association for Support of Graduate Students, and we are members in good standing of the Statistical Consulting section of the American Statistical Association.
We offer ultra-fast turnaround times, often completing projects/sections in 3-4 days.
We have expertise in the specific requirements at the seven major online schools (Walden, Capella, Nova Southeastern, University of Phoenix, Touro, Argosy, Northcentral) and can save these students many months of tuition.
On this page, we will cover the following three topics: an introduction to our experience working with PhD candidates, precisely what our service entails, and why you should work with us instead of with another statistical consultant.
An Introduction To Our Experience Working With PhD Candidates
From late 2001 through early 2005, we worked primarily on statistical consulting for businesses (see our client list), journal articles for university professors, and pro bono work for medical researchers. However, the recent proliferation of legitimate online Universities offering PhD degrees (Walden, Capella, Nova Southeastern, University of Phoenix, Touro, Argosy, Northcentral, etc.) has led to the situation of students often being ill-prepared to complete the dissertation process without seeking outside assistance from a professional statistician who is familiar with the specific processes followed at these schools. Since expanding our client base in the spring of 2005 to include PhD candidates, we have helped these students save thousands of dollars in tuition while graduating months earlier than their peers. Assisting PhD candidates is now one of the top priorities of our firm.
When we decided to begin offering services to graduate students, we carefully researched the services being offered by other statisticians. We realized that many less-qualified statisticians had now entered the statistical consulting industry solely to assist grad students. For the most part, they aren't qualified or able to do the required work.
Two other large problems needed to be addressed:
First, almost all of these other consultants merely 'advise' on the statistics for dissertations. For most students requiring assistance with the methodology and results sections of their dissertation, this is not sufficient. If you choose to work with us, we will assist you at the level of participation that you or your committee suggests is necessary. Usually, this means selecting the most appropriate methods to use (and not merely the easiest ones, which many other consultants do), and addressing sample size requirements and the means of sampling, and then assisting with the creation of the methodology section (chapter 3 in APA format) of your paper. Upon approval from your committee, we then conduct the data analysis and assist in the creation of a draft of your results (chapter 4 in APA format). Each of these steps usually takes no more than 3-4 days, and any/all modifications required by your committee are included in the price. Afterward, we prep you for defense and peer review until you are fully prepared. Professional APA editing for chapters 1 and 2 can also be provided. Since the IRB requires a large degree of care with the handling of collected data, we of course ensure complete confidentiality.
Second, the price charged by others for this service is usually prohibitive to a student on a limited income. We endeavored to create a service for PhD candidates that is both much more in-depth and much more reasonably priced than any other firm in the industry.
Therefore, we expanded our firm in the spring of 2005 to begin working with doctoral candidates with the goal of providing them with the absolute best service possible - the same service we had been providing to businesses and medical researchers for years. Since then, we have worked with over 300 students in various disciplines, including education, psychology, finance, and many others.
Precisely What Our Service Entails
We work with students at all stages of the dissertation process, from those in the earliest stages (deciding what topic to study) to those in the latter stages (only needing their data analyzed and their chapter 4 completed). The following list contains what we will do for you at each stage of the process. For specific information on the process of working with us at various stages, you can also go to the appropriate section via the menu on the top left of this page.
Here is what we will do for you if you are starting at stage one:
First, we try to truly understand the issue you are studying. We will do this by reading everything you have produced so far (your earlier chapters, your proposal, etc), as well as any articles of your suggestion. At this point, we will be ready to suggest a proper way of moving forward.
We then work on your statistical methodology. If you've not yet collected your data, we begin by assisting you in the development of the optimal sampling strategy as well as the best methods of statistical analysis for the data to be collected. At this point, we also determine the necessary sample size for your study by performing the appropriate power analysis, and we examine the reliability and validity of your constructs. Experimental design (planning the collection of data) is quite possibly the most important step of a project. Time (and money) lost by poor sampling often cannot be recovered through a data analysis. Let us help you design a data collection plan that will avoid any pitfalls.
At this point, we assist you with the provision of a draft of your methods section (chapter 3) in APA format to be submitted to your committee for feedback. We will make any/all changes required by your committee to get it approved, no matter how long (or how many revisions) it takes.
If you need assistance with data entry, we can help you to set up a template, or we can provide data entry for you for a reasonable extra charge.
If you already have a completed/approved methods section, we will begin at this step:
When your methods section is approved and your data is collected, we will conduct the statistical analysis of the data. Unlike many other consultants, we are proficient with virtually every statistical method and test, and various statistical software packages including SPSS, SAS, STATA, STATISTICA, JMP, LISREL/AMOS/EQS for structural equation modeling, NVIVO/NUDIST for qualitative work, and virtually every other relevant statistical package.
We will then send you a professional draft of your results (chapter 4). This will include the outputs of our analysis (figures, tables, etc) all in APA format, along with a detailed summary of the findings.
Professional APA editing can be provided for the rest of your paper (chapters 1 and 2) for a reasonable fee. In addition to assisting with the rather arcane APA formatting rules, we also strive to help you in an intelligent manner with the entirety of your paper, integrating your editing work with practical suggestions on content.
We can also assist you with the development of your literature review (chapter 2) with your discussion section (chapter 5). Call or e-mail to discuss this option with us.
Ongoing support – We can demonstrate how to interpret the results, provide ample instruction on the methods used (and why) and what the results mean, suggest reading materials for you to greater understand the particular statistical methods used, give you a PowerPoint of the main points of the results, and allow unlimited email and phone support to ensure that you completely understand the results of the analysis and can discuss them freely. This includes preparation for the defense and peer review process.
Why You Should Choose Us Over Another Statistical Consultant
There recently have been several new entrants to the statistical consulting business that provide services to graduate students. None of these consultants offer a service remotely as dedicated as ours. Also, none of them offer nearly as reasonable of a value. Here are some key differences:
We conduct the entire statistical analysis for you, and explain the methodology and results until you completely understand them. We take pride in explaining complex concepts in statistics and mathematics in a simple way and have been referred by numerous committees because of our expertise. Do not settle for someone who is not skilled at explaining the work that he did for you in such a way that you can understand it. We will work with you until you understand the complete analysis, no matter how hard it is. This is the part of the job that we all love the most because we consider ourselves to be teachers and not just "doers".
We charge a very reasonable price. Do not settle for someone who charges you upwards of $7,000 to advise on the statistics for a dissertation. We offer a much more complete service, are infinitely more qualified to do the work, and do it at a price that is below the average of the industry (which has become geared towards the overcharging of grad students).
We have the time to work on projects on a case-by-case basis, and we will not take on your project unless it truly interests us and we can give it the time that it deserves. Do not settle for someone who subcontracts out the work. We don't take on too many projects at once, but rather only an amount that allows us to give each the complete attention that it deserves. This is why our work is top-notch and why we can complete most sections within 3-4 business days.
We have never had to turn someone away because we couldn’t handle the complexity of the data set or research questions, and we frequently accept clients who have been turned away by other consultants because the analysis was too complex for them. In fact, we base our guarantee on this. Do not settle for someone without a history of success who cannot handle complex analyses.
Journal Article Assistance
Minimax Consulting works closely with researchers who are in the process of writing or designing a study with the aim of publishing it in a peer-reviewed journal. This can often be a daunting task because published papers must meet a very high level of scientific rigor and represent original research in the field. Our team of highly trained statisticians with diverse backgrounds (such as psychology, finance, economics, biology, etc.) can help you with all the phases involved in the creation of a publishable research paper:
Literature Review: We can help you find literature related to any topic, summarize previous findings and review different methodologies used to approach the same or similar studies. We have full-text access to scholarly articles in large databases such as EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Blackwell Synergy, ScienceDirect, and many others.
Methods: Defining the methodology to be used in a study can be a very difficult undertaking for the least statistics-inclined researchers, or when the study itself calls for non-straightforward design of the experiment and statistical/mathematical procedures to use in the analysis. Our team is proficient in methods and procedures of virtually any level of complexity, from Content/Thematic Analysis to Monte Carlo analysis to Structural Equation Modeling to Multi-Factor ANOVA to any type of Regression analysis – linear, logistic, weighted, ordinal, etc. We can thus help you with essentially any type of study, regardless of its complexity level, at a very affordable price.
Results: Minimax's team works with our clients to conduct the analysis of collected data, using any software package required (including but not limited to SPSS, SAS, LISREL, AMOS, STATA, R and MATLAB). We can not only conduct the analyses and report the results but also explain in simple terms what was done, how to replicate the results, and what the results mean.
Discussion: How do the results relate to findings from other research papers? What are their implications for policy-making? What are their limitations? Our team can help you answer all these questions based on the study’s results to make a strong closing section for your research paper.
In short, Minimax Consulting can assist you throughout any or all of the phases of a scientific study, with the rigor and level of complexity required and maximizing the likelihood that the study will be accepted for publication by its reviewers. Moreover, given our team approach, expertise, and organizational size, we can offer very affordable fees.
Feel free to call our office for a free consultation.
Please click here to read our Academic Integrity policy.
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