Well, it's a long story for me. I wasn't someone who liked math. In fact, several of the serious "talking tos" that I received from my father regarding school work had to do with math classes. My ability to fail math classes in high school was right up there with my ability to fail Spanish class. It all hearkened back to the third grade where I came to dislike multiplication tables. All that memorizing of things.
In a huge example of social promotions I made it to the fourth grade where my teacher had a fit that I didn't know my multiplication tables, called my mother in for a conference and the next thing I knew I was looking at these stupid flash cards with multiplication problems on them instead of watching TV. What's to like about a subject like that?
After that I bumped along, usually not actually failing, but never learning very much. Then I got to college. My father, who previously had been on my case about failing math told me that I should major in business so I could get a job when I graduated. Although my mother never worked my father assured me that I was going to need to work and that as long as I was going to "have" to work I might as well major in something where I could get a better job.
Grinnell College didn't have a business major but you could take Economics so I enrolled. Yikes! There were all these people who'd taken all this math in high school, when I'd happily been reading T.S. Elliot. But I didn't give up. Remedial Algebra, Calculus for Poets, Micro-Economics -- I slugged through it all, and didn't fail anything although I may have gotten some "Cs" that were grades of grace.
My general plan was to become an accountant. I was the Student Auditor for the Student Government Association and knew how to write numbers in account books. I'd taken a couple of summer school courses in Financial and Cost Accounting and as far as I could tell it was light on heavy duty Algebra and the really confusing stuff like exponents. When I made it to DC my employer would pay for me to learn to be a Systems Analyst and who can argue with that? Again, there were numbers all over but the computer did all the hard part if I could just tell it what to do.
I landed at the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which I loved and still love because they deal with energy and one of my hopes is to get our country off it's dependence on foreign oil. Life went on, I programmed, but I also had some encounters with illness and developed an interest in those sneaky little P-values that you see next to clinical trials to treat illness. If I knew what those meant then I wasn't dependent on some doctor, who most likely was one of those obnoxious Pre-Meds I knew in college who was taking Micro-Economics because it was an easy A. So I found myself enrolled in community college refreshing a lot of things I probably covered in college about statistics. These days I'm no girl-wonder but I'm not afraid to wade into a spreadsheet or a research article and can readily tell you that the standard error is the square root of the variance.
Here is the quiz that the EIA put up today. The pages are a little slow sometimes but the questions are good and you can see how much you know about energy.
