At the beginning of the course you unpacked your history with math courses.  Many of you expressed feelings of anxiety and lack of confidence about taking a statistics course.  At the end of the semester, all of you have been successful in a statistics course and found a way to relate statistical concepts to your professional and research interests.

For this second assignment, you will write another “chapter” of your Math Autobiography.  Reflect on your learning in this course and how this learning might impact your professional or research perspective.  What surprised you about your learning in this area?  What questions do you still have?  What suggestions do you have for other students of statistics who might feel anxious about a course in statistics?

I was relieved to see that I could DO the math.  I was concerned that more algebra or calculus skills would be required.  My test scores have not been perfect, but at least they were OK, 35/40 and 34/40.  This gives me the confidence to believe that I can finish the course with success.  The concepts we have studied are understandable, and the book gives us clear formulas to use. I can follow a formula.

I am beginning to pay attention to the statistics information in the academic articles I am reading, because I understand the statistics vocabulary better.  This gives me a better understanding than just reading the conclusions.

I still have some difficulty in deciding what some of the problems are asking me to find, especially when the data is limited, but the more I work with the problems, the more understandable they are.  I find the “solved problems” in the book to be useful examples.  I am still also concerned about

using statistics on my own data when I actively begin my research.  I hope I can design my interviews and survey questions well enough to give me data suitable to analyze statistically.

For other students anxious about statistics I would recommend the course.  If you read the book and follow the lecture, you can understand the concepts.  The math itself is relatively easy (with a calculator); the course is more about concepts than math.