I'll be honest, I genuinely love being back in a classroom where math is being done up on the chalkboard. I missed playing with numbers. For the last month or so, I've been taking intensive summer statistics workshops. Since eventually I will be doing biostats research through the School of Public Health, it made sense to dedicate part of this summer to some more formalized preparation. Earlier in the summer I did bits of calculus review on my own, but my current classes include matrix algebra and linear regression. I am a nerd, and I love that my desk looks like this right now.

One aspect of the classes that I appreciate most is the interdisciplinary nature of the students. In fact, most of them are political science students or others doing social science research. It is fun to learn about quantitative methods of analysis with people who deal with data sets that are often quite different than those we see in biomedical science. The nuances of their questions and of the problems they run into with their data are of a different sort. Perhaps more than anything, though, it's been nice to walk through the statistical analysis and computer programming with others who are also learning it for the first time. Plus, the classes are over on Central Campus, so each day I have a beautiful walk down through the Diag!