My first semester of statistics was a very interesting experience. In the beginning it started out simple with some of the concepts that I had learned in high school. After a a few weeks it started to get a little challenging with all of the concepts like Poisson distribution and T-distribution. At that time these concepts were new to me but now I am familiar with them thanks to professor Halleck and his power point slides. I also learned about excel as well which will definitely come in handy in the workplace, in other classes and in daily life. Now that the semester is over I plan on strengthening my probability skills over the summer to prepare me for my next statistics class and computer science class. I hope that I get a good professor like professor Halleck.
MAT1372 Statistics with Probability, SP2018
US: blue is gdp/population, red is median household income, both in constant dollars and indexed from 1993
This was my first semester of taking a math class which was dedicated purely to statistics. The experience was quite worthwhile as it taught me how to use excel. I always wanted to learn how to use excel for a while , because it is pretty much the de facto way people use to tabulate data. Excel is used in all corners of business so it will help me get a job in the future. What I learned though specifically about excel is how careful I need to be. For example if I try 4 instead of $A$4 even though the two values are the same my countif can be completely thrown off. Then the project was my first time really gathering data on my own and I learned the importance of covariables and how important the way questions are phrased and surveys are conducted to the results. I thought you could do it in anyway, but the more specific I made the questions more likely people responded to them genuinely in my experience, because they weren’t confused about what they were being asked. Then like the population. I picked kids from specialized high schools really and didn’t realize how skewed the gpas can get. Like most of them were above 3.5+ which surprised me. I realized that I need a more random sample or representative of the population. Another thing I learned was the importance of graphs. Graphs are needed to show that you truly understand the work and let you tabulate the data faster. Like for z scores the graph gives you a visual image and shows if you really understand what a z score means instead of them just being an equation you plug and solve with. They show deeper understanding of the concept. Overall this stat class was fun and taught me the meaning of the small details. This is really important to my major which is biomedical informatics. In this major we look at relationships between data for meaning. Chi square, P-values and everything can be used to see if there is meaning in between the relationships and trends in the data. So I can use this statistic class to better understand the data to be able to get meaning of the human genome.