I’ll be teaching a graduate course in epidemiology in the spring and giving a talk on biostatistics at SAS Global Forum in April, so I thought I’d jump ahead and start rambling on about it now. When I tell people that I teach epidemiology, the first question I usually get is, What’s epidemiology? In short,…
This is something that has bothered me for a long time. When I read tables and reports from the National Center of Education Statistics (yes, I do, don’t judge me!), it makes it sound as if all is well with rural education. According to this table, for example, 100% of rural schools have at least…
When I first taught multivariate statistics, I was nervous. The material is more difficult than Statistics 101 so I assumed teaching the course would be more difficult as well. Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve found the opposite. The more advanced you get in a field, the easier the courses are to teach. You might…
Seven years ago, when I founded The Julia Group, I submitted a grant proposal to develop an online algebra course. After 18 years of writing grant proposals for universities, tribal councils and other organizations, I wrote one just for me, for something that was near and dear to my heart. I know that developing educational…
Twice in the last week, I’ve had people say to me, expecting agreement, Winners never quit. You know that, right? You’ve won a world championships, founded several companies, earned a Ph.D. You never would have done that if you quit. I would like to go on record with my opinion. That idea that winners never…
I try not to be a hypocrite, so after a long talk this week with someone about the importance of admitting mistakes and not continuing to go down the wrong path, I sat down and asked myself, Self? What mistakes have I made? Certainly, if you can’t see any mistakes you have made, you are…
Thirty years ago, I was a wet-behind-the-ears young industrial engineer working at General Dynamics. The production line had been shut down a couple of times in the past few months and I was sent to investigate. I met with the division manager and he told me that they had run out of material X, a…
Ironically, just after posting that I was going to get back to blogging, and my first post back on how grateful I am, I got really sick, didn’t do anything, fell behind at work and so didn’t do any blogging while I caught up. So, here we are again and now I am really grateful…
It’s been a pleasure speaking to groups around North Dakota this past week, in part because I was asked a lot of intelligent questions, which really forced me to think about the answers. One young woman asked how I maintained a positive attitude when times were difficult, when my husband died, when there is a…