#stats major

Thank youu :3

Hello! I got a lot of the same comments when I picked stats as my major🥲

Two things are key to persevering through a stats degree, (1) not beating yourself up when you fail and (2) reaching out for help when you don’t understand something. Stats has a lot of disconnected but continually reappearing topics and you’ll get confused and fail sometime- that is perfectly okay and normal, you just have to learn to let it roll off your back and do better next time! This is when my second tip of reaching out to professors, other students, or uni resources come in. Your professors want you to understand the content (or at the very least are paid to ensure you understand the content)- go to them when you don’t understand something! There is no shame in asking for help.

All calc, especially your multivariate calc, is very relevant to statistics, so I’d brush up on your calc 1 and calc 2 skills if it’s been a while since you’ve used them. Additionally, I’d review probability rules, and basic things like finding means and variances. Later on, you’ll cover “distributional results.” When you get to these, absolutely keep a running list of these results that you frequently look over!

For narrowing down your interests, I’d recommend exploring finance courses, science courses (chem/bio), and coding courses. Statistics is a super versatile degree and there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility!

I would 100% recommend a laptop for two reasons. As a statistics student, you will likely be coding a good bit; mostly in R, but probably in SAS, python, and possibly matlab as well. As far as I’m aware, there’s no software that allows you to adequately code in these languages on a tablet/iPad. Secondly, hand writing on paper is much better for retention. I have an iPad as well, but I only really use it for homework to save the trees from all my scratch work😅 you could accomplish the same effect with a white board and marker. All of my notes (and even sometimes my homework and practice problems) are on paper since you retain the info significantly better. My friends in the stats major who also have an iPad or tablet for notes have also switched to using pen and paper over the years to help with retention since there’s a lot you need to have memorized.

the crisis counselor I talked to said it’s important to live in the moment, which sounds fluffy, but she went on to explain: If you’re walking to class, try not to let your head get into a tizzy about how much everything will suck (which she called catastrophic thoughts). Instead, let your brain focus and really live the moment: You’re walking to class. How do your feet feel? Which way is class again? What are you seeing and feeling? In this very moment? How is your breath?