When I was in my doctoral program in Counseling Psychology, we were required to take two semesters of graduate level statistics. The reason for this was the scientist-practitioner model, which holds that psychologists should be experts in both the science (which tests, mathematically, what is valid and what isn’t) and the practice (actually providing skilled services to real people). This all makes sense, but in the case of our program it meant that the eight of us people-oriented folks were in statistic classes with twenty of the folks for whom numbers and experiments were their reasons for getting up in the morning. So those two classes were generally considered to be our most challenging.
But of course, as with many things that are difficult, we learned more information of value than we thought we would. I am a better consumer and evaluator of scientific research than I would have been without these classes. I also took away two key ideas, one from each semester.
Early in the first semester, we were introduced to multivariate analysis. This statistical technique is used to determine how much (if any) a particular factor contributes to a given outcome. Most outcomes, of course, are not caused by just one thing; instead, there are usually many contributing factors and often we can’t determine everything that goes into the result. But we try, and that’s why statistics is important and as a student I needed to connect with a reason why it was important to study this stuff. Here is the example that stuck with me: the most important determinant of success for children was their ability to delay gratification. More than intelligence or socioeconomic success or a host of other factors, the ability to put off getting a goody now in order to get a bigger goody later was associated with success in life.
So that was the lesson from first semester. Not only did it help me to survive the statistics class in order to reach the larger academic goal, it impressed me with an important idea about how humans function in the world. Going for the immediate gratification, whether it’s in making a career choice or building a relationship, doesn’t reap the greatest rewards.
And then came the second semester of statistics. We had a different instructor, and the concepts were more complex. Fortunately, the instructor really cared about whether we internalized the important ideas, so he told us on the first day of class that he had a philosophy about our quizzes and exams. He said that the problems were designed to basically “come out even,” so that if you found, at any step in solving the problem, that you were getting a number with, say, seven decimal places, you were probably on the wrong track. In such a case it would be better to stop, crumple up the scratch paper, and start over. Maybe you were using the wrong formula altogether, or maybe you had made a simple math error somewhere along the way.
Hmm. Another life lesson. If you keep trying, but you keep running into things that don’t look right, maybe you should reconsider and try a different path.
So do these two ideas contradict each other? Is it like saying “Persevere in the face of obstacles” on the one hand and “Give up if it’s too tough” on the other? I actually think that the ideas complement each other. If you set a goal, persistence is important. But sometimes you run into a dead end and you have to re-evaluate—maybe refine your goal, or change your idea about what it might look like to obtain what is most important to you. Sometimes persistence is defined by steady progress and sometimes it’s defined by lots of crumpled up papers on the floor.