Stats

Why am I taking statistics? It's not required for my program. I could walk into my adviser's office today and say I want to change my plan of study and she'd be fine with it. I mean, I took the one intro class and got an A, so that's good enough on my record, isn't it? Because in the long run, am I really ever going to remember what a multinomial regression is? Or a likelihood function? Or an odds ratio?

I think at this point it's become a personal challenge, like I have to do this in order to believe that I have what it takes to get a Ph.D.

But this weekend, I was working on my stats practice exam, and the stupid thing made me cry. I've cried a lot because of statistics during this academic year. I know that I'm not dumb. The stuff just doesn't make sense to me.

Much to my initial relief and subsequent anger, I got the following email from the TA today:

"Hello all, the practice exam has some material on multinomial logits,
where the outcome variable has more than two categories. We haven't
really covered that much in class or homework, so don't worry about it
much when you're preparing - it won't be on the exam."

I'm still in the anger phase. I really spent a lot of time trying to figure the problem out, and then spent a lot of time beating myself up for not knowing how to do it. Sigh.

The test is on Thursday. Wish me luck.

Sidenote: Congratulations to my friend Tanya who submitted her Master's Thesis today!!