During the second semester of my Freshman year, I had the opportunity of taking a math course called “Statistical Decision Making.” This was a elementary statistics course which was designed to give students a working knowledge of the ideas and tools of practical statistics and their usefulness in problem solving and decision making. Throughout the course we studied descriptive and inferential statistics and how we can apply those skills to real world situations. The content in the class was pretty interesting at times.
Although I did not particularly enjoy this class (it just felt like another class I was taking), the material that I learned is still valuable and important. The material was very elementary and felt too easy to me which surprisingly made it more difficult for me. Because it was so easy, I was disinterested and was not having fun like I normally do when I’m pushing myself to have a deeper understanding of the material being presented to me. This does not mean that the professor did a bad job! My professor was PHENOMENAL! She genuinely wanted her students to understand the material and she would constantly go out of her way to make sure her students were doing okay with the class and their college lives. Personally, this class was too easy and it caused me to become disinterested because I was bored.
The course did become tremendously more challenging during the second half of the semester! This was because of a few reasons. The biggest reason was that the outbreak of COVID-19 made the college campus shut down. This resulted with all classes moving to an online forum for the remainder of the semester. This was very challenging to me because I enjoy and thrive where I can meet and interact with people in person. This helped me learn better. Now that the semester was completely online, I had to learn to hold myself more accountable for my success and to go outside my comfort zone and ASK FOR HELP! I have always been the kind of person who preferred to struggle than to admit weakness and ask for help. This experience actually taught me that being strong is about being able to swallow one’s pride and ask for help. Whenever I asked for help when completing an assignment, my professor was always there for me and she never hesitated to help any of her students!
Another reason the course became harder was because the assignments the students needed to complete became more complex and time-consuming. While we were practicing social distancing, we were tasked with conducting a study and writing a two-part analysis on our results. The study was conducted at the beginning of the semester by a questionnaire that fellow statistics students took. The results of this questionnaire gave us the results we needed to work with to finish the other computations we needed to conduct for this assignment. We were not given an example paper to base out work off of so we were all left to fend for ourselves when it came to how we write the paper.
One of the biggest reasons the second part of the semester was because I was going STIR CRAZY in my house. Governor Northam enacted a Stay At Home order that made most travel prohibited. Staying at home all day….everyday….made me lose motivation to do assignments. I never let an assignment slip past me but working up the motivation to actually start the assignment was hard.
I am proud to say I passed the class with an A! The semester may have presented a few more challenges than I was expecting, but I prevailed and did what I needed to do!
Below is my artifact for this course. This is my Inferential Statistics writing project that I submitted at the end of the year.