...20 degrees outside starts to feel warm.
You know your a college student when your idea of a Saturday night is renting a movie because you don't have money for most anything else and you don't have time to spend on much anything else.
You know your a U of MN biostat student when you know why R-squared isn't always an appropriate measure to use in a regression analysis.
I was recently asked if I could write a blog about what I learned last semester at U of MN and how it may relate to my future career plans. So I guess I should fill you all in as to my future career plans. I hope to earn my doctorate, become published, and become a professor. In other words, I hope to do research and teach. Teaching is one of the best ways to loss your fear of public speaking, learning how to manage your time well when unexpected questions may arise, and get some feedback as to how your can improve on public speaking.
To digress for a minute, I had this incredible fear of public speaking when I was in undergrad. We had to take a speech class where we had to give speeches to our classmates. My other classmates were allowed to use a podeum, but the professor would not allow me to use one so that I could overcome this fear. It didn't really cure my fear of public speaking, but this experience definitely gave me the knowledge that everything would be just fine without the podeum.
Then when I came to Western Michigan University (WMU), I was given a teaching assistantship. This T.A. role was different than how most schools use their T.A.'s. There was no instructor assigned to the courses I taught (each semester I got two courses of 40 students each). I was it! I had to do all the lesson plans, the quizzes, the grading, the lectures, and even determine the student's final grades. This was very difficult at first because I would get so much anxiety built up preparing for and leading the course. By the end of my time at WMU, I can definitely tell you that I have entirely overcome my fear of public speaking.
Ok, back to the point of this blog...how has the U of MN prepared me for my future plans thus far. Briefly,
- I learned a considerable amount of Real Analysis, which will definitely help me in understanding the mathematical theory behind the statistics.
- Today I was assigned some survival analysis work with my trainee-ship on campus. I was very thankful to have taken Surivival Analysis last semester. Phew!
- Stat Theory I was basically laying down the foundation beneath the building blocks of biostatistics. The rest of my courses at the U of MN will be using everything I learned in this class.
Outside of this, I feel like I am just chipping away at the iceberg that is biostatistics. There is so much left out there for me to learn & discover. Hopefully I will become published in my future using the foundation that I am learning today.