waxing ecSTATic

For the past three weeks, I've been taking a statistics course at a branch campus here in Southwest Ohio in preparation for my Ph.D. program. It is a statistics course for engineering majors, but I figured I would have a good shot at passing it. I had to get a waiver to get into the class because it is the second one in a sequence and requires a calculus prerequisite, which I haven't seen since Bill Clinton was president.

I'm happy to report that after three weeks, I have a 93% in the class, which is quite amazing. I still have three weeks left, though, and it gets nothing but more difficult as we go. I'll be fine -- I think. Anyhow, this experience has taught me a lot about statistics, but an equal amount about being noticeably different from my peers.

First, the classroom in which we have class is filled with old geography maps from the 80s. I can remember getting these while in elementary school and really being blown away at how sophisticated they appeared. I mentioned this during break to a few fellow students, and they mentioned that they've always been a part of their classrooms as far back as they can remember.

I'm the oldest person in the class by a couple of years. This is a very new experience for me, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about playing the role of the old guy.

I come to class straight from work, which means I'm wearing a shirt and tie. I'm more dressed up than our professor. On the first day of class my professor asked why I was wearing a shirt and tie, and I quipped, "I thought we had to." He said that there weren't any dress code requirements, to which I stated that I was just kidding, and that I come to class directly from work. I'm still not sure he realized I was joking. (This is not the first time I've said something stupid in the early stages of a relationship that subsequently strained said relationship henceforth.)

In hopes of spicing up 3 1/2 hours of statistics twice per week, our professor shows us funny email forwards, YouTube clips, and other funny stories every half hour. Surprisingly they are quite entertaining and entirely unrelated to statistics. I wonder if there's a correlation there. (See? I can make statistic jokes, too!)

I find myself being a little gratified when I arrive at a "right" answer after a lot of thought and calculation. In qualitative inquiry (my graduate training), there was never a "right" answer per se, so it was a matter of subjective argumentation and reasoning. Formulas, I've found, can be quite nice.

Just three more weeks... I just keep telling myself that it'll be worth it when I have four less credits to take at Maryland.