Hello Friday

I didn't pass. Well I didn't fail either, but I still feel pretty bad. I worked as hard as I could have worked, but it didn't make much of a difference.

It was the first time I latexed a whole paper, I really used the stepwise regression in R which apparently I still didn't understand well enough, the first time I did PCA in R I think, and the first time I used leverage values and cook's distances in a report or understood them.

I guess some of those things are pretty basic to undergraduate level statistics. I know for a fact though when I took regression 108 in the summer we did not learn about leverage points or cook's distances, AND we used minitab. We didn't even do a stepwise regression except on paper...

And then over the summer when I worked with Sandy I remember she helped me with the model selection and ran the stepwise regression for me in SAS. The problem with the exam was that a lot of the questions that Burman asked me were not ones I ever learned in class, or they were ones I should have learned in his class I should say. Except he didn't teach it. Maybe it's because I took it with him over the summer and it covered less content or maybe it's just something you pick up later on on your own, but it's definitely not something explicitly taught to me.

I tend to retain things better when I'm actually taught them. I feel sad about being the only one who didn't pass my oral, but I can't really blame myself that much. The description for the exam said to write a publishable data analysis and do an oral defense. As far as I'm concerned, there were no problems with the quality of my data analysis, all the problems were conceptual. If I had known that was the kind of questions I was going to get, I would have studied and reviewed my 108 materials instead of spending so much time doing the data analysis and trying new methods.....

I still feel bad though. No matter how much I learn, people always seem to expect more from me. I just don't think I can assimilate material that fast. I can make a list of every new thing I've learned in the last two years that would be pages long... I just think there's only so much I can cram into my brain at a time. And it's not all that fair because almost everyone has had 4 extra years to cram into their brain this stuff, so naturally they know more. What I'm really getting is a masters and bachelors degree in statistics in 2 years, without having taken a single math class in college. At times when people are frustrated with me, I just want them to realize that, I wouldn't expect them to be a math major and get a masters degree in cell and developmental biology in two years.