The Statistics Course from Hell

I’ve been doing statistics on my data for a while now. OH, did I say “doing”??? Actually, I meant “struggling through”. The stats program we have here is exactly that, a program… i.e. programming. And apparently it tells you if your whole grad career was worth the paper you wrote up the research proposal on or not.

So I’ve been leafing through my old notes from the grad stats course I took a few years ago. Looks like that course was good for something, though not much. It was the course from HELL. It's legendary in our department as a "right of passage". Thank God someone came to their senses (shortly AFTER I took it, hmmm). Maybe the suicide contemplation of their students YEAR AFTER YEAR finally convinced the nutrition profs to send their students to another department for statistics.

This course was designed for crop and animal scientists and one of the profs who taught it was a total moron. He gave us partial example problems (never a whole problem worked out from start to finish) with mistakes in them ALL THE TIME, and there was too much time spent doing fricken math equations to apparently ‘learn the theory behind the stats’ (which is BS if you ask me) and definitely NOT enough instruction on the practical end-- the stats "program” I mentioned earlier.

In class, Rose and I would get bored with the moron prof and entertain ourselves with what the geeky grad student were wearing (usually pleated pants yanked all the way up to their manboobs, thick glasses and greasy hair) or some other observation we’d made. Sometimes we’d play this game where we’d pose a question such as: If there was a nuclear war and the people in this room were the only survivors, who would you procreate with to repopulate the Earth? Funny thing is that we both picked the cute short dude in front of us, and Rose’s future husband, unbeknownst to anyone at the time of course, sat at the back of the room. Sorry Des! You’re cute, REALLY… Oh man, in retrospect that’s just too funny. During labs we'd get on msn messenger and try to make the other person laugh out loud. It was challenging to stifle it at times!

Between class, lab and the weekly assignments, the course took 30-40 hours per week to do. This is on top of quasi-normal life and other courses and teaching and seminars… you get the idea. Rose and I would spend ALL WEEKEND on the homework. The times when we tried to start earlier in the week, we’d find out Friday that there was a mistake in the assignment question we’d worked on and all the hours we spent trying to figure it out were a total WASTE. Yes, we would spend HOURS on a single question, not having a clue as to how to even approach it.

I’d just started dating my now ex-boyfriend about a month into this course. He’d always ask me to do something on the weekend and I’d say no, that I had homework. He started to suspect that I was blowing him off. So he informed me one day that he’s really good at math and statistics. Yeah, he took UNDERGRAD stats, which I also thought was EASY. But hey, if he was actually good at math, why not let him help? He came over and we gave him Question #1 from our weekly assignment, plus the textbook for the course, and sent him into the other room. An hour later he came back and said he had NO IDEA how to do it. We laughed, not at his stupidity, but at the utter stupidity that was the stats course.

It was during this time that Rose and I went crazy. We were seriously NORMAL before that period. Seriously. Err, well perhaps it just brought out the crazy already lurking within. Either way, we needed a stress release… There were several coping mechanisms that helped. The first was laughing… It was over this time that Napster was big and we were diving into the joys of free music and, that’s right, wav files. We must have downloaded every fart sound effect file out there! There was Beethoven’s Fart Symphony, well you can imagine that… it was a total GAS! Oops, my bad. We’d giggle to no end listening to that one. There was also a whole jig of toilet farts, and our favourite, the single fart sound effect that we’d secretly slip onto music CD’s we’d make for friends and family. Wah ha ha ha! Yes, totally juvenile but just what the doctor ordered.

Rose also developed this noise she’d make out of the blue as a stress release. It was like a groan-grunt (I think she described it as her “retard noise”, which is so un-PC that I didn’t want to say it… uh yeah, since I’m so PC in the first place…). In the middle of something stressful, she’d release the noise and we’d both totally crack up.

Finally, we used to sing... at the TOP of our lungs. There was one song that we’d play during particularly frustrating times, and we’d belt that one out LOUD. This could be partly why the downstairs neighbours, the lovely people that they were, might not have liked us too much. The song was called “Stash Up” by a band called OPM.

The part of the song that was particularly stress relieving went like this:

Put your hands up
This is a stash up
Pull the trigger and you're gonna get mashed up (4x)

Now I dont give a f*#@
Not a single f*#@
Not a single solitary f*#@
Cause I don't give a f*#@ mother f*#@er (2x)

Nope, definitely NOT popular with the neighbours… but it stopped us from slitting our wrists or downing some tranquilizer pills with plenty of gin chaser. I’m 100% sure of it.

And I have no idea HOW I would have gotten through it if I’d not had Rose to go through it with... I would have snapped. I’m 200% sure of that.