Statistics

[Plutonium261]

Just wanted to say that I've for the most part historically been super scared of math. Math in general, except for medical math, for some reason medical math/dosage & calculations just makes sense to me, I got a 98% in that class. So I'm in my BSN program and when I was getting ready to start statistics I was completely dreading it to say the least. Then about a week before I started our first class I sat back and was pondering things one day, I do that every so often, and I told myself that I will not let it beat me. I will not worry about what anyone else is doing or how anyone else is doing in the class, or any of my other classes for that matter, and I will just take it one class at a time and give it my absolute best. I think that's another huge point to make is that it's so easy when you're excited about something like your career, to get side tracked or we tend to look forward to the classes that intrigue us most, and we don't always put 100% into the (maybe) not so fun current class. And truth is every current class deserves just as much respect as the next one whether we like it or not. So that's what I've vowed to do with all my classes. Take each current class one class at a time. And I'll tell you what, statistics, though a lot of work and a lot of little formulas to memorize, is not nearly as hard as I thought. I'm actually doing really well in it. Just something to think about. I know it's not always so easy to be in the moment, but if we can sometimes force ourselves to do that with certain things it can be very beneficial. Anyways that's all.

[smf0903]

Good advice :) I adore math so I thought I'd love stats...my respect for stats came when I took genetics and used it there because that's when it truly made sense to me LOL. Good luck to you!!

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

I was the same way, having escaped trigonometry/algebra 2 in high school with a gentleman's (lady's?) C+ and glad to get it. My friends took calculus senior year; I took a half-credit art course. I was a member of the last class at my college not required to take statistics, and I sure as hell knew I would never want to go to grad school, so I sure as hell didn't take it.

Fast-forward 7 years after graduation and wanna go to grad school ... statistics prerequisite. Sigh. But fortunately one of the junior colleges near where I was living had an educational/psych statistics course that a few of my buddies had taken and really liked, so I bought a calculator that did square roots :) and signed up.

Turned out I totally loved it, it made perfect sense, and all of a sudden all those p values and Rs and stuff made me see why and how research findings were reliable or not. We did have a great instructor who encouraged us to bring examples from our work settings (we came from all kinds of jobs, I might have been the only nurse) and that helped us all. I still remember a discussion of whether a big number or a small number was automatically meaningful compared to another one; my example was that 75mg of meperidine wasn't much, about comparable to 325mg of ASA or 650mg of acetaminophen in pain relief, or 5mg of morphine. He loved that one. All pain relief, all different numbers, but you had to know what they meant in context. That was my stats class. Aced it, to my complete astonishment.