Statistics

There is a time in my life that hearing that word would cause me to cringe. It still does to a small degree, but much less than a year or two ago.

I grew up, like a lot of engineers, with a love of cold, hard math. Even from my elementary years, I loved its predictability and reproducibility. Plug some numbers into a formula and you can predict what will come out. Use the same mathematical operator in a different context with different numbers, and you know how it will behave (At least for linear systems and operators).

However, to me statistics was the equivalent of grammar in the math world. Math was so much better than grammar, with all its bendy, shifty rules and the necessity for context. My dislike for grammar was summed up by an adage one of my teachers used: “You usually can’t say always in grammar.” Why would I want to plod through something I didn’t consider “real” math to end up with a non-exact answer? The beauty of math was in its simple exactness.

This aversion to the messiness of statistics persisted in my life until only recently. In high school, I dropped AP statistics to have a home-release period where I would go play tennis. The college statistics course during my undergrad never got past simple probability and distributions, and there were ample extra credit opportunities for going to conferences and such. I was grateful at the time, to slide by without having to actually learn statistics. This was a subject I considered to be impure compared to calculus, but subconsciously I think it was just because it was hard and non-intuitive to me.

Finally, I was forced to deal with my fear of statistics the hard way my Senior year of undergrad in helping prepare a manuscript for publication. I was the data analyst and was in charge of performing the statistical tests to verify the significance of the effects we were observing. It was extremely difficult to me, but I finally saw how statistics were both important and useful.

During my PhD coursework, I took the Computational Biology class by Dr. Galagan at BU. From this class, I have gained a real love and curiosity regarding statistics, probabilistic thinking, and machine learning. I have come to see and recognize the power in using probabilities to gain a more accurate representation of how things in the world (specifically biology) actually may work. To use exact math on non-exact biological systems, you definitely have to make simplifications that may not always allow you to prod the interesting parts of a system. However, probabilities and statistical thinking can provide ways to address different questions that simplified systems cannot.

In short, this experience highlights one of the core things I value about pursuing a PhD. I have been 1. provided opportunities to learn and 2. forced to confront subjects I had previously written off in my life as not interesting or useful and actually learn those subjects. As such, I have learned to love learning and seeking after knowledge that I do not yet have. I still have a long way to go, but I am glad that even as a second year PhD student I can recognize the benefits of pursuing a cutting edge graduate education.

Signing Out,
Kyle Hansen