In high school and/or college, who here had to take statistics? I'm betting a lot of you did. It's something they tell you that you cannot get by in the world without. They also said this about calculus but who uses that? Anyway, statistics. It's hard to say...hard to do...just plain confusing stuff. I had to take two classes of statistics in college. Bad bad memories. Long nights staring at numbers and trying to wrap my brain around analysis that made no sense to me whatsoever and just hoping I could pass the exam. I did, by the way, pass those exams. I passed both of those classes but not without blood and sweat. Seriously. Oh the paper cuts I suffered. Ok, maybe not. But it felt painful.
After those two classes, I promptly threw out all of my notes (who wants to be haunted by those) and did a brain dump and forgot everything I knew. Except for standard deviations. I couldn't get rid of those. My chemistry teacher in high school forced me to learn those and then my chemistry classes in college used them as well so it was pretty well integrated.
Now picture this, my boss asks me to put together a worksheet. (Little fact about me: I do all the excel worksheets at work) On this worksheet she wants a graph. As I'm putting together the graph, I realize...this graph won't be accurate unless I remove the outliers. Where in the world did that word come from?! Zooming up from the past, this statistic word comes flying in. Then I realize, what my boss really needs is a statistical analysis. And the tears and blood start again...
So here I am, sitting at work, staring at it and suddenly cursing myself for not keeping all of my statistics notes or at least not keeping it in my head. I ask everyone around me and they have the same answer for me, they did their own brain dumps because WHO IS GOING TO USE IT ANYWAY RIGHT?
Well...I'm here to tell you...you do use it in real life. I'm so ashamed that I just said that because I always told my teachers I never would. Now I'm looking up formulas online for this confusing stuff that wouldn't be so confusing if I had just remembered it from before. Cue the little violins.
If any of you are statistical geniuses, please let me know. My graph won't be nearly so good if I can't do what I'm sure needs to be done.
Statistically dumb,
FFR
