Stats

Social media seems to make everyone’s life appear as though the Buddha’s teachings on suffering have been modernized. Life is suffering has given way to life is filled with abundant travel, insight and pet-cuteness.  As I scroll through my Instagram feed on any given day, for example, it seems as though the majority of my Instagram friends are enjoying epic runs, savoring delightful meals, or documenting egregious acts of pet-cuteness. I find blogging can often reward similar behavior.

In sitting down to write this blog, I considered three possible topics. Two were kind of fun, and the third had a bit of emotional sting to it. As you can probably surmise, I am opting to pursue the latter.

It’s a long story, though I’m only now getting around to taking statistics coursework. Typically graduate students slog through statistics coursework their first semesters in graduate school, and then utilize their statistics knowledge to produce their research, and ultimately, a thesis and/or dissertation. For a number of reasons that seemed logical at the time, I deferred stats coursework until my 3^rd academic year as a graduate student.

The one bright spot in this seeming oversight was that my research foci clarified, and as a result, the particular types of statistical knowledge that I need has come into sharper focus. In order to competently analyze the various signals that may be embedded in the heart rate variability data of the YogAutism project, for example, I will need to know more about statistics than mean, median and standard deviation!

With my analytical background (undergrad degree in Physics), it seemed sensible to skip more foundational stats coursework and walk directly into Psych 610. I spoke to the professor in advance of the semester, who warmly welcomed me into the class, albeit with a vaguely ominous observation – this class is a lot of work, particularly for those students without prior computer programming and statistics coursework. While I did have some programming experience (I worked with Fortran and C in the late-1980’s), I had no background in statistics to speak of.

I walked into class on the first day, and was almost immediately intimidated by the conversations going on around me. It seemed like my classmates were all vandals or herpetologists, as they spoke confidently of Bash and Python scripts. While it turned out that both Bash and Python are computer languages, my self-doubt magnified once the professor began lecturing. He kept emphasizing that the class was a lot of work, very time consuming and not to be taken lightly. In my experience, these are generally appraisals that arise well into the semester, and the preemptive nature of their mention seemed foreboding.

Statistics are a significant component of my
graduate work.

Foreboding yielded to actuality when I stepped into the first lab session. The focus was ostensibly to review the R statistics software, and the majority of my classmates seemed entirely conversant in this software package. After struggling mightily to figure out how to operate the return function on my Mac, my intimidation turned into full-on dread.

As I trudged out of that lab session, it was clear that I was in over my head, and I had to find a Plan B. Not taking statistics was not an option, as I was already feeling the effects of my statistical-knowledge deficit, and I didn’t want to postpone working on my MS-degree another semester or two.

Thankfully, another stats course that satisfied my departmental requirements had available seats, and I painlessly slotted into an Educational Psychology stats course. This class proved to be more my speed, and I’m now 50% through my stats requirements. Most importantly, I’m incrementally gaining the knowledge that I’ll need to competently analyze the YogAutism data.

My graduate school adventure has been alternately inspiring and humbling, and I’m grateful for both. I’m inspired by the creative thoughts and inquiring minds inhabiting the University of Wisconsin – Madison. And I’m learning to lean into my growth edges more willingly through the process of pursuing a graduate degree.

As part of leaning into my growth edges, I’ll be rolling out a new look for this blog within the next few weeks. It’s my hope that this new look and tone better communicates my continuing fascination with the explorations of Body and Mind bidirectionality that I like to call Movement Lab. I look forward to writing more regularly, and hope that our paths may continue to cross via this blog, workshops that I teach, or at my studios in Wisconsin.