A Great Day

My Stats instructor is really cool and she gives me enough information to explore some of my mathematical interests. So, today I was able to prove the central limit theorem which is one of the fundamental ideas in statistics. It is to some extent a bridge between theoretical probability and sample probability. That is, it is the basis for inferential statistics.

Links and Junk

I found a cool link to a human factors psychology program directory. As I find stuff like that, I like to post it in my links section. I just remember when I was searching for something to do with my life after getting a bachelor's degree in psychology. I was pretty of human factors and industrial-organizational psychology. I thought that I was going to have to go into counseling to avoid working at a university. I/O and human factors are very research oriented and practical. There aren't too many careers that will get you involved with the military, NASA, or some Fortune-500 company. People often go into science to add to the body of knowledge in a scientific way, but I am telling you psychology is wide-open and theses fields are highly scientific. Moreover, there are still many grand discoveries to make.

Teaching

I have to say that one of the biggest concerns of mine was whether or not I would be good at teaching in graduate school. I thought that I would just teach the introductory psychology lab, but because of my experience and second-years and beyond getting internships, they gave me a statistics lab which is a second-year or master's level position. This made me extra nervous. My first class was terrible. After it, I was a bit discouraged. However, in graduate school, it is do or die. My funding comes from teaching so I have to do it. Well, the next class went well. and the third class was awesome. I got up there and forgot about being nervous, and mathematical and statistical knowledge just flowed out of me.

How School is Going

School is pretty hard. All of my class-mates are really smart. However, I have to admit that the extra year and a half of math and all the tutoring really shows. I might be tooting my own horn, but I am light years ahead of most of them. Not that I think I am a super-genius or anything, I just have the experience and background. Anyway, statistics is pretty easy so far. However, my other classes that require a lot of reading are difficult. It is a big adjustment to go from reading 40 to 60 pages per week to 200+ pages. Inters tingly, since I am in an experimental field we will mostly use text books for statistics and research methods. I have a book for introduction to I/O, but it is only for the first part of the semester. The emphasis is on reading journal articles.