All modesty aside I have to admit that I have a very impressive career as a statistician. In college we had statistics every year and it was never a happy experience. There was something inherently confusing about the subject, it wasn’t real maths just some sort of made-up subject to keep politicians in business.
Due to all that confusion (and possibly some lack of studying) my exam results were a sight to behold. In the summer of first year, I successfully survived the exam and came out with the dizzying score of 12%. Yes indeed, it takes a special type of person to reach those heights!
In second year I was determined to do better, we had a new lecturer who wasn’t as scary or confusing as the first one, things were looking good. I sat the summer exams with a renewed sense of optimism. It worked too, I got a personal best, far exceeding the embarrassment of the previous year, I was a true statistician, I got a very respectable 13%.
With two years of statistics under my belt, I was well on my path to becoming the greatest statistician ever, there was no stopping me, nothing could stand in my way! The third year exams results reflected my ambitions, I had finally been able to show my hidden potential, my fellow students were falling over themselves in their praise, after all, not everyone can get a result as high as 16%!
In fourth year I wasn’t offered a statistics course, never understood why…
There’s a saying that those who can’t do, teach.
At the time there was a shortage of statistics post-grads, they had no-one to give Statistics tutorials to the business students. They offered the jobs to the fourth year maths students instead. I’d always flirted with the notion of being a teacher so I offered my services.
I said to myself that if they asked me about my previous stellar results in statistics I’d be honest and tell them how good they were but the lecturer didn’t ask, I didn’t tell and so I spent a year giving Statistics tutorials to business and accounting students, though I never did inquire how they did in their exams….
