• Introducation to Statistics
• Regression
• ANOVA
• Multivariate
• Multilevel Modeling
• Qualitative

plus Tests and Measurements. By most criteria I should be a statistician.

Yet I am having a MASSIVE case of impostor syndrome on this very topic. Statistics are the one thing we learn in a PhD program that we can easily and rapidly market; there is a DRASTIC shortage of skilled statistical analysts out there and you quickly discover that even a little knowledge puts you head and shoulders above the crowd. Yet the statistics that are taught are very research oriented and not necessarily appropriate for applied settings.

The problem is that I am very aware of what I don’t know; of how I don’t completely understand what I was taught in those classes and how it is insufficient for what I am trying to do with the skills. I find myself reluctant to take on the title of “statistician” because I feel there are massive holes in my ability to apply the techniques I learned. As the title indicates, my skills look good on paper but feel lacking when I start trying to apply them.

Now, if a PhD teaches you anything it is how to go off and teach yourself something. And I could conceivably do just that; I have all my books (and many more) and could start reading until my ears bleed. But I admit that I learn better with structure.  (By all accounts I should be the PERFECT person for a DIYU type of approach, but it is far too easy for me to find other things to do with my time if I don’t have assignments with deadlines and other people telling me what I did or didn’t get wrong.)

Therefore I am considering getting another Master’s degree in Applied Statistics. A co-worker (who is finishing his law degree this semester after which he intends to take the bar but never practice) and I have been talking about doing it together, and I think that might be an interesting way to go. There are 3 excellent online programs (Penn State, Texas A&M, and Stanford), 2 of which are not obscenely priced*.

Regardless of which school is chosen or even whether I go with a structured program, to really understand statistics requires calculus (2-3 semesters), something I DON’T have. (I took 1 semester of business calc in my freshman year and just barely dragged my butt out with a C.) So this spring I am taking Calc 1 and 2 in 8 week sessions through the local community college (while teaching 2 sections of stats and working… I swear I am the only person I know who DOESN’T consider that a crushing load.) This christmas I am slamming my way through preparing for it and reawakening all the algebra I learned in High School. (More on that in another post.)

My goal is to do MORE than look good on paper, but to actually know it and have the benefit of other experts guidance in how to apply what I know.  I need to get there one way or another.

*Really Stanford?  $58,950 just for tuition for a 15 course program?  I realize you are the number one ranked stats programs, but TAMU is number 8 and Penn is number 14 and both cost less than HALF the price including fees.  Cut a girl a break here….

GRIT: A psychologist has come up with a painfully simple 12 question instrument to determine whether someone has the stick-to-it-ive-ness to finish something great.  She calls it GRIT.  See Getting Things Done in Academia (newly reawoken) to understand a bit more and follow this link to the instrument itself.  I got a 4 out of 5, meaning I have quite a lot of Grit.  Hardly a surprise.

SPITE:  In contrast, Post-Academic in NYC talks about the power of SPITE to drive you through the completion of your dissertation.  I could empathize here, since there was an extent to which I finished to prove a particular full professor wrong.  I’m pretty sure he told people I would never finish, and that pisses me off.

I’m not quite as bitter as Post-Academic, and I don’t know that spite alone could have gotten me through if I hadn’t had grit as well.  Grit was the part of me that said “You said you were going to do this, so DO IT.”  Spite was just the gleeful voice in the back of my head that wanted to rub his nose in it.

P.S.  The universe gave me a graduation present this summer.  I was asked to review an article on a topic I know something about.  I agreed.  When it showed up, it was clearly the latest edition of an ongoing series of reports by aforementioned full professor.  I shredded it.  Not maliciously, but because he had failed to support any of his assertions with research or facts, and I called him on every single one.  It was cathartic.

I would suggest two additions to the list.

1. The Statistical/Mathematical group should include qualitative research tools, like NVivo or Atlas.ti.  Just as most intro stats courses also introduce a stats tool like SPSS, I think most qualitative classes should introduce a qualitative tool and that we should all have at least basic skills with both.  We may not all DO both types of research, but knowing a bit about the tools available can help us when we collaborate with others.
2. The centrality of a good reference management software and the importance of backups are listed under Miscellaneous.  I’ve posted on both of these topics before many times, and believe they are FAR to important to your success as a scholar to throw at the bottom of any list.  So consider this a way of raising their profile.

Take a good look at the entire list.  The academic job market is a tough one, and we can no longer compete if we are not competent with technology.  This list will give you a good starting point.

What I didn’t realize as I went through these permutations was that the tools needed to manage coursework were different from the tools needed to manage the dissertation.

Even with my project management certification, the dissertation was the biggest SOLO project I have ever executed.  A book is comparable.  Parts of the process can translate – for example it is critical to break the dissertation into sub-parts in order to make it a workable task, which is the same for any project from a course paper to cleaning the bathroom.  But the timeframe and VOLUMES of material you have to keep straight are very different.

During my coursework I could carve my day into pieces and usually cross at least one thing off by the end of a piece. I tried to do something similar with the dissertation and found it didn’t work so well. Admittedly I could “read and take notes on article X” in a chunk of allocated time.  But that didn’t help me integrate article X with articles Y, Z, and A through F on the same topic.  That integration time was much harder to schedule, since sometimes it came easily and other times it didn’t.

In the end, from a productivity perspective, I blocked off chunks of time (ranging from an hour to a day) and then put together a goal list at the start of each session.  Planning those goals in advance didn’t work; I needed to take into account my mood, my level of energy, and most importantly what I had completed the last session.

At the same time certain planning became easier.  I no longer needed to maintain a complex, detailed schedule of my days because I was no longer running from work to class to teaching to homework to somewhere else at top speed.  Class was no longer in the picture, and there really was only one “homework” assignment to be worked.

When you move out of coursework and in to writing your dissertation, you need to revisit your tools and systems.  Accept that the requirements have changed and therefore the system needs to change as well.  For some people, that will mean setting aside a dedicated hour or two per day to work on the dissertation while for others it may be setting aside a day or two per week where you focus on that.  Organizing the other elements of your life around these times will may require a different approach or it may be just a different way of using what you have.  Regardless, taking that step back and revisiting your system will help you make the best use of your time.

One of my bigger mistakes was setting aside things like eating right and working out regularly while I worked on my dissertation.  I am INCREDIBLY lucky that at 45, despite being fat all my life (size 22), my cholesterol has been good, my blood sugar normal, my resting heart rate is very low (55-60), I breathe 2 times to my husband’s 3 breaths, and my blood pressure is normal.  I had blood drawn earlier this week and those things are still the case; normal thyroid, blood sugar, cholesterol, iron, and all that good stuff.

During the course of writing my dissertation, however, I put back the 60 lbs I had previously lost.  I had kept the weight off for 2 years before starting the dissertation but now am right back where I was before.  So I get to diet again until I lose that weight.  It was hard enough the first time.

I took my cruiser bike out on sunday for the first time in ages.  No pressure, not a speed thing, just ride for 30 minutes.  Cardio-wise, that was no problem.  But my legs started to burn before I got out of my cul-de-sac (It’s only 3 houses long).  The road bike (on which I used to go for 2 hour rides for fun, and maxed out at 5 hours) is staying in the garage for at least a couple of weeks until I can make it a bit further before the burn starts.

Working full-time while working on the dissertation made it very hard for me to keep in perspective the fact that this was a marathon and not a sprint.  I felt rushed to try to get done, and as such kept sacrificing things like exercise, cooking decent food [note: popcorn is not a meal] and paying attention to my weight.  I appear to have dodged a bullet, as the effects are primarily in terms of my clothing size and not my health, but I am likely an exception.

This is a slow, time-consuming process that will take a while.  If you keep up your exercise habits and eat well, it might take a little while longer.  That’s OK.  This is also a stressful process and keeping up your health and fitness will help reduce that stress.  If I could do it again, not only would I not have stopped those things but I would have added yoga to the mix in order to deal with stress.  Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

(Think about it this way:  if you are concerned about the extra money that additional time in grad school might cost, you can either pay that money to the school or to Old Navy for new clothing as your size changes.  Your choice.  I’m pretty sure it comes out about the same…..)

Having gone through the process, this is no longer surprising.

I wrote once before about knowing what you are getting in to when you go to graduate school.  I’m not going to repeat what I said there.  If you are thinking about graduate school, go back and read that post.  I would add that if you are going to graduate school to change the world / do good / make things better [and you are not going into specifically medical research], join the peace corps or go work for a non-profit.  A doctorate is rarely the right path to do those things.

I would add a few more things however.

1. Money.  Living as a graduate student is a type of painful, debt-incurring poverty.  Many of those who stop do so because they can’t deal with being poor anymore, and they discover that they have options.
2. Doing a dissertation is hard work.  It isn’t impossible, and doesn’t require you to be a genius, but it DOES require you to be stubborn and play the game according to the rules of the academy.  These rules apply nowhere else and are often detrimental to success in the “real world”.
3. Most of this work is done on your own.  While this was moderately easier for me as an experienced professional, it is still sometimes overwhelming and full of doubt.  Then you get two cross-examinations by experienced people in your field who will grill you on all sorts of things, at least some of which you never considered and many not even care about.  You are put through a confidence-destroying process in the hopes that you will come out strong and confident on the other side.  Then they wonder why many people don’t finish and others graduate with “imposter syndrome”.
4. There is little structure, which allows you to drift aimlessly for a long time.  As I did, earning 12 extra research credits because I couldn’t pick a topic and changed my idea a half-dozen times.
5. It is easy to feel that your work has no impact on the world.  Especially because it doesn’t.  Most of what is written by academics equates to a strange form of verbal masturbation that involves writing things few people will ever read about topics so specific that no one cares or so obvious to a practitioner that they make the writer sound too stupid to qualify for “Big Brother”.  There appears to be a point during the dissertation process where that futility hits you, and you either have to muscle through it or walk away.
6. It is usually at this stage that you find out what a starting associate professor gets paid, what you have to do to get one of those jobs (such as pack up your life and move to East Nowhere to work at Bottom-of-the-Barrel University), and just how much work goes into getting one of those jobs in the first place.  [The academic hiring process is like nothing I have ever seen outside of the executive offices of fortune 500 companies, and even those places rarely go to the same extent or take half as long as a small department will take in hiring a lowly new prof.]

Sometimes it’s all of the above.

I wanted to quit a dozen times during the process.  I didn’t because it was drilled in to me by my good German father that we finish what we start. Despite the fact that he’s been gone for a good 20 years, that is still part of my psyche.  But as I have admitted on here before, the degree adds little to my career and I blush every time someone calls me Doctor.

In hindsight, starting the PhD was a mistake.  I shouldn’t have done it.  I should have dropped out early.  I should have dropped out anytime before I started the dissertation.  Once started, however, my personality wouldn’t let me, and now I have a cookie.  But that cookie cost 6 years of hard work, a great deal of stress on my marriage, 60lbs gained and a lot of a good bit of money.