Quick, how long is your daily commute to work? (or to school, coffee shop, or favorite breakfast hangout)? If you came up with an answer, then you already are a statistician!
If you came up with an answer like “It usually takes me 30 minutes,” then you are already using the subject of our new course, Descriptive Statistics, to describe and summarize data.
If you came up with an answer like “It usually takes me 30 minutes, give or take about 5 minutes,” you are already constructing confidence intervals, a topic covered in our second new course, Inferential Statistics!
Why should you learn statistics? Statistics is formalized intuition. Most people already use it on a daily basis (most people…that sounds like a statistics word, right?). In these two introductory courses, you will learn the difference between probability and statistics, and see how statistics is pervasive in our personal and professional life.
Even better, you can apply concepts learned to every industry, subject, and passion in your life. Statistics forms the underlying prerequisite skill set for careers in Data Science, Computer Science, and many more technical and non-technical sectors.
In Descriptive Statistics, you will learn to gain insight from data by calculating sample statistics that summarize central tendency. Learn to visualize data using histograms, quickly compare sample distributions to the Normal Distribution, and calculate variance, skew, and kurtosis.
In Inferential Statistics, learn to construct 95% and 99% confidence intervals, test statistical hypotheses using the Standard Normal z-score, and expand out of normality with the Student’s t-distribution.
If this is a completely new subject to you, begin with Descriptive Statistics and continue on to Inferential Statistics. See you in class!
