What's your latest discovery? What do you hope to learn next?
RINNNGGGG. I walk into the classroom as the bell rings-a room plain as a daily routine. The scent of a bit too much air freshener lingers in the air. Surrounding me are colorful posters pasted on the walls. A dozen note cards filled with quotes and axioms reside on the posters. One by one, everyone sits down as our teacher Mr. Richardson enters briskly with a smile on his face. Not wasting a second, he begins, "Alright everybody, give me a topic-animals doing something silly. Platypus's riding unicycles? Ok, let's say that the mean time platypuses can stay on a unicycle is distributed normally with a mean of..." -my AP Statistics class has started.
Statistics covers a wide variety of subjects, but of them all, measures of center is by far the most repetitive. Everyone has already heard the terms mean, median, and mode a hundred times before they take AP statistics. Yet it was a lesson on measures of center that proved to be one of the most insightful moments in the class.
He started off with a story: An unemployed man was trying to find out the average yearly salary of pencil sellers. So he asked three of his friends, who came back with completely different numbers: $125000, $40000, and $15000. Why did he receive three different answers? More importantly, which of these numbers was the best representation of reality? Each of his friends had chosen a different way of determining the average: the first chose to report the mean ($125000), which was skewed right due to the big salaries of the CEO and upper management; the second chose to report the median ($40000); and the third chose to report the mode ($15000). In the end, the median was the most correct, because it is the unbiased estimator.
I was amazed by the contradictory "facts" that could be presented based upon the same data. It made me realize that contrary to popular sentiment, nothing is absolute in life, not even mathematics. People trust numbers because they think that numbers are "cold hard facts", but in reality, numbers can be just as subjective as a personal opinion. The more abstract side of mathematics scared me at first; I had always taken solace in the fact that in math, there was only one right answer. Finding this belief to be untrue was like finding out the sky is green. Initially, I wrestled with this new concept, unable to come to terms with it. In time, however, the subjectivity of numerical data grew on me. I found it fun to search for the statistically correct answer among all the "right" answers.
Therefore, I want to major in statistics so that I can learn more about the synthesis and interpretation of subjective numbers and data. Although there is a degree of uncertainty within numbers, there is still a "more correct" answer, and looking for that answer among the other seemingly correct answers is a challenge that I look forward to facing in the future.
Please be as harsh as possible (you will not hurt my feelings, I promise)! Thank you!
RINNNGGGG. I walk into the classroom as the bell rings-a room plain as a daily routine. The scent of a bit too much air freshener lingers in the air. Surrounding me are colorful posters pasted on the walls. A dozen note cards filled with quotes and axioms reside on the posters. One by one, everyone sits down as our teacher Mr. Richardson enters briskly with a smile on his face. Not wasting a second, he begins, "Alright everybody, give me a topic-animals doing something silly. Platypus's riding unicycles? Ok, let's say that the mean time platypuses can stay on a unicycle is distributed normally with a mean of..." -my AP Statistics class has started.
Statistics covers a wide variety of subjects, but of them all, measures of center is by far the most repetitive. Everyone has already heard the terms mean, median, and mode a hundred times before they take AP statistics. Yet it was a lesson on measures of center that proved to be one of the most insightful moments in the class.
He started off with a story: An unemployed man was trying to find out the average yearly salary of pencil sellers. So he asked three of his friends, who came back with completely different numbers: $125000, $40000, and $15000. Why did he receive three different answers? More importantly, which of these numbers was the best representation of reality? Each of his friends had chosen a different way of determining the average: the first chose to report the mean ($125000), which was skewed right due to the big salaries of the CEO and upper management; the second chose to report the median ($40000); and the third chose to report the mode ($15000). In the end, the median was the most correct, because it is the unbiased estimator.
I was amazed by the contradictory "facts" that could be presented based upon the same data. It made me realize that contrary to popular sentiment, nothing is absolute in life, not even mathematics. People trust numbers because they think that numbers are "cold hard facts", but in reality, numbers can be just as subjective as a personal opinion. The more abstract side of mathematics scared me at first; I had always taken solace in the fact that in math, there was only one right answer. Finding this belief to be untrue was like finding out the sky is green. Initially, I wrestled with this new concept, unable to come to terms with it. In time, however, the subjectivity of numerical data grew on me. I found it fun to search for the statistically correct answer among all the "right" answers.
Therefore, I want to major in statistics so that I can learn more about the synthesis and interpretation of subjective numbers and data. Although there is a degree of uncertainty within numbers, there is still a "more correct" answer, and looking for that answer among the other seemingly correct answers is a challenge that I look forward to facing in the future.
Please be as harsh as possible (you will not hurt my feelings, I promise)! Thank you!
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