Goal 5- Mathematics
Out of all of the goals required for my degree, mathematics was the one I was least looking forward. The subject made me struggle since elementary school, and it only worsened up until my high school days. Therefore, I told myself that I would select the easiest math class possible: Statistical Decision Making. Not only would it assist me with one of my major requirements, Statistics for the Social Sciences, but also give me insight on gathering data that we see come up in polls and research papers on a daily basis. After a few weeks, I soon found that Statistics was the class I excelled in, more so than my other classes for the semester. Dr. Emerson took us through step by step with each lesson. With each new statistical procedure, we learned how to both work out the problems through our calculators. I was pleasantly surprised that we only learned how to solve with our calculators, as all of my other math classes stressed we learned by hand too, if not that alone. As long as we wrote down the steps we made in the calculator to get our answer, full credit was given. One of the biggest assignments of the semester was to form a group to collect real data from the university. Each group found a polling question online, and we all went around the campus taking down answers from them. We then took our data and formed graphs, made calculations on our research hypothesis, and took careful notes to see if our project included any polling bias. This project proved the practicality of a math class to me. Previous to this class, I had the mindset that all math classes gave you nonsense equations and complicated algorithms that would never apply to my career. Needless to say, statistics proved me wrong. Whether I end up as a foreign service officer or just a regular police officer, I realized I would be gathering statistics and analyzing them in whatever field I end up in. Going in with that attitude made it much easier to carry on throughout the class, and it was because of that attitude that I had a blast.
Attached is my group’s report on our survey. We gathered questionnaires that measured student perceptions of alcohol and marijuana, more specifically inquiring if they thought they were dangerous. It outlines the procedure we made to make as much as an unbiased poll as possible, and includes the statistics of each question divided by class rank.