In the fall of 2019, I took the honors course Statistical Decision Making. This class was an Honors-only math class, which meant that we moved at a slightly quicker pace and covered more subject material than the other statistics classes offered. To be completely honest, I was quite nervous to take this class! In high school, I had attempted to take a statistics course, and I actually ended up doing quite poorly in the class. I had been able to complete other math classes with relative ease, as I have a bit of a knack for math, but statistics entirely confused me and I struggled to understand even basic concepts.

However, this class was not only understandable, but it was actually quite fun! It was taught in a way that was very easy for me to learn and used data from real life situations, which helped me apply what I learned in a realistic way. It helped me to connect what I was learning to the real world, which gave me a purpose for doing what I was doing. I am so thankful that I decided to give statistics another try, because I had grown to fear something that was actually quite fun and interesting to learn about!

My artifact for this class is the second paper I wrote. We had two individual projects and one group project, where we learned how to write statistical papers. We were tasked with writing a paper that could be rad and understood by someone who had no prior experience working with statistics, which means that we had to fully define and explain any terminology, as well as any processes that we used to complete the project. This project was incredibly helpful to me, as someone who struggled with understanding statistics, because I was able to explain my statistical findings in a way that I knew past-me would have been able to understand!