There’s a reason I chose Statistics to be no. 10 and the first one in this countdown. When you want to enter the world of data science, you realize very quickly that you can do nothing without the concepts of statistics being clear in your head. The University of Texas at Dallas obviously understood this and made Statistics and Analytics a core course. So, when I started my Master’s program in Fall 2018, I enrolled for this course with Dr. Avanti Sethi in my very first semester. Dr. Sethi proved to be an excellent teacher, and I am honored to have had the pleasure of knowing and working with him during the past two years.
Thanks to his well-designed lectures and assignments, I was able to build a strong statistical foundation with good practice of basic concepts like measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and measures of statistical dispersion (variance, standard deviation, IQR). The course then went on to cover concepts like population, sampling, estimation, z-score, t-score, Normal distribution, hypothesis testing, p-value, chi-square tests, ANOVA tests and regression. Dr. Sethi, who is an Excel ninja, also conducted a separate hands-on session for students interested in learning Advanced Excel and taught us how to build macros. The problem statements in his assignments covered real-life scenarios ranging from sports team performances and automobile dealerships to Halloween sales and manufacturing plant obstacles.
And just like that, right in the very first semester, Statistics and Analytics had set the ball rolling on my data science journey. I have been going back to Dr. Sethi’s assignments every few months, to make sure I don’t forget the very foundations of everything that I have learned in analytics so far. It was a memorable semester thanks to this wonderful class, and left me with a lot of confidence to move forward.
This is the first post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.