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8 reasons not to date a statistics graduate student

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

(The title is entirely misleading, because I do not hang out with any statistics graduate students that aren’t me – therefore I really mean ’8 things that I do that are irritating now that I am a statistics graduate student’. That’s not as catchy, though, so … continue.)

1) She will correct you (and your friends) when you use the word ‘probability’ lightly. Probability means something specific, people.

2) She will make you quiz her on the difference between the Cramer-Rao theorem and the Rao-Blackwell theorem. You will not care, because she doesn’t really care.

3) She will endlessly cite ‘this thing I read’ and then spend ten minutes with her smartphone trying to find it, because she doesn’t want to tell you the wrong sample size.

4) She is broke. (This has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with her being a grad student.)

5) She is cranky. (See parenthetical above.)

6) She will derail every conversation with ‘I wonder how likely that is’.

7) She will watch all of the episodes of Supernatural that are available on Netflix on an endless loop while she studies. (What, I told you I don’t hang out with other stats students. I have no reason to believe this isn’t true for everyone. (<= That is some TERRIBLE statistical inference that I just did there.))

She wants to graduate more than anything else in the world, including more than she wants to be nice.

Ok, fine. This is basically an apology to everyone for me sucking. And me being mean. And also me being boring. And watching all of Supernatural for the third time (Crockett, that one is for you specifically). I’m very sorry.

Tags: graduation is in 37 days 15 hours 30 minutes and 41 seconds, I'm dyin' over here
Posted in I make lists, it's all about me, school, whoops | No Comments »

Not my job

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Today was Career Day on campus.

Career Day is nothing more than a career fair specifically geared at college students. A buttload of companies (don’t worry, I didn’t say buttload in front of anyone there) show up and set up booths and you talk to them and you hand them a resume and then… I don’t really know. Something happens. They sift through the three hundred resumes at the end of the night and set up interviews for some of them, I guess? I handed out 11, because the number of companies interested in a person with a masters degree in statistics is depressingly low, and I expect to hear from maybe four of them. I will immediately tell one of those calls that I’m not interested – it sounded fun at the time, but now I realize that it’s the quintessential Boulder software company, and I would hate everyone and everything about it inside six months.

It’s good to know yourself.

The most frustrating part of my day, though, went like this:

I wanted to talk to a company that does some sort of television… something. Honestly I don’t remember, because no one ever showed up at their booth and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whoever they were, their empty booth was next to the Navy booth. So I kept swinging by, and every time this dude at the Navy booth caught my eye and I nodded and just kept going…

And then, one time, he caught me. He saw my nametag, which had my name, major, and degree on it, and asked if I was interested in teaching.

I am interested in teaching, so I was like …. ok, what up, yo. He tells me about this instructor position that they have at a nuclear school in Charlotte, NC. (The school isn’t nuclear, they just teach nuclear stuff). Apparently they have a need for math instructors. He gave me the full sale – the benefits, the wages, the fact that you leave after four years with experience. And then he asked when I got my bachelors degree, and I told him, and then he asked how old I was.

I’m 31, I say.

He drags me to every other navy person there (and there were quite a few) asking if I could get a waiver for being 31. I was a little insulted, honestly. He never told me what was wrong with being 31, just that it was something that needed to be waived. Finally, someone tells him that yeah, it can probably be waived. Everyone else in the vicinity of the booth at that point was aware that I was probably the oldest person at the career fair, but hey – that can be waived.

That established, he looks down at my arm and asks if my tattoo is real.

No, I drew purple flowers on myself for Career Day.

Yes, it’s real.

Again with the waiver – except this time everyone needs to look at the size of my hand in comparison to the size of my tattoo.

This fellow was working very, very hard to recruit me, and I appreciated that.

I also left the booth feeling like an ancient painted lady.

I will not be joining the Navy.

Tags: ancient painted lady my ass
Posted in it's all about me, school, work | 2 Comments »

more of the same

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Is it possible to cure writers block by writing something that isn’t what you started out trying to write? (Even if that thing that you write is a run on sentence that requires several seconds to parse.)

I am writing words now, so technically, yes, it does seem to be true, but the true test will come momentarily when I return to the thing I actually need to be writing.

The thing that I need to be writing has the potential to be sort of a big deal (to me) and I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it’s taking up all of my time.

Oh, also? I applied for a professor job at a community college today. That I am willing to talk about, but I find myself with very little to say. I filled out an application, wrote a page about why I’d be good at the job, a page about my teaching philosophy, and then submitted the whole shebang along with my resume and transcript. It was very exciting – but it’s possible that I’m letting Community cloud my judgement. Anyway, even if Jeff Winger doesn’t show up, I think it’s a job I would both enjoy and perform well.

That is if psychic detective is completely off the table.

P.S. Our toilet is bound and determined to run, and it’s going to drive me fucking insane. In my townhouse the toilet ran but a) you could fix it by jiggling the handle and b) I always blamed it on the ghost that lived there with me, so it never really affected my life. This? This is either my fault, Crockett’s fault, or no one’s fault, and when one is faced with a running toilet, one does not simply blame no one. And the handle jiggle is completely useless. It’s very irritating.

Tags: Oh Jeff Winger - where are you when a girl needs you?
Posted in I have a pop culture problem, I think I'm funny, it's all about me, tellin secrets | No Comments »

Happy 2012!

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

I actually don’t know very much about the whole Mayan end-of-the-world prophecy thing, and I’m scared to look into it just in case - you know – it’s real and then I have to decide what to do with my final ten months.

Anyway, last year of forever or not (probably not), I’m not making any resolutions this year. I want to resolve to be a better blogger, and to resolve to finish my book, and resolve to not take things at school so personally. I want to resolve to exercise every day, because it is an important a commitment as finishing my homework – for both my physical and mental health. I want to resolve to figure out what makes Cloey puke on the couch and stop her from doing it.

I’m not going to officially resolve any of those things, though, because I have no particular dedication to resolutions and I’m just as likely to do them just by virtue of wanting to do them. Which is to say, slim-to-moderately likely.

I guess we’ll see.

Also up in 2012 – graduation! A job, probably! My 31st birthday in two weeks!

What’s new for you?

Tags: Here's to the Mayans being a bunch of pessimists
Posted in it's all about me | 2 Comments »

these books, they are audible!

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

In the category of things that I do way more often than people around me think I do, there are only a few items.

Grocery shop.
Play Minesweeper.
Listen to audio books.

Boom. Done. Everything else is either something I do an expected amount, or something I do an a larger than average amount but everyone totally knows (things that fall into that category – gossip when drinking, cook).

Grocery shopping – wev. Minesweeper? Awesome – I play it while I walk the dogs, while I’m in class (sometimes), occasionally while watching television – really any time that I need a little distraction.

Audio books, though? People, are you audio book people?

There are different ways to listen to audio books. My mom, for example, sits down and listens, while doing nothing else.

That’s the wrong way.

The right way is to listen to audio books while you’re doing other things. My personal favorites? Driving, walking, and working out.

Thing that sounds like a segueway but isn’t: yesterday, the hot water heater in my townhouse busted. The tank rusted through, and I had to go buy a new one and pay someone to install it. My reaction to that was… well, first it was to cry. My more measured reaction was to spend some time with Mint.com, assessing my expenditures and looking for places to cut a few corners.

Mint informed for that for the last 32 months, I have spent an average of $30 a month on audio books. (I use Audible.com). With average Audible pricing, which is much more affordable than buying books on CD, that works out to about 2.3 books per month. I rarely invest in a book that’s shorter than 15 hours, because I blow through them so fast.

All this math means that I pay for (and listen to) about 35 hours of audio books per month. Not to mention that I inevitably re-listen to something I already bought at least once a month, when I’m out of credits at Audible and have to wait until the 4th of the next month, when my new one comes. That brings my monthly listening total to ~ 50 hours.

That’s 1.6 hours a day.

I’m awake for about 16 hours a day.

I spend 10% of my time listening to books on tape.

Other than doing homework (and watching tv, which is what I do while watching homework), I cannot think of another thing that I spend 10% of my time doing.

When I saw the dollar signs on Mint, my thought was to cut back on my audio books – but here’s the thing. My books make driving to and from school tolerable. They make waiting for Cloey to fully explore the scents of some recently peed on bush interesting. They give me something to listen to at the gym other than the guy grunting on the pull up machine.

Music, of course, would do all this – but books are stories.

I’m officially setting aside $30 a month to support my habit. The cutbacks will have to come from elsewhere.

I mean, who needs haircuts?

Tags: it's not like I can return the tattoo, p.s. I know you can get them from the library but they're old and also I've already listened to most of them
Posted in it's all about me, money to burn (apparently) | 2 Comments »

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