During the winter session of 2023 at Wesleyan, I needed to enroll in a statistics course to meet the requirements to be admitted to the Psychology major. Never having taken statistics before, I was intimidated. Fortunately, there are other options to meet the requirements instead of taking a full Psychology Statistics class. Psychology 280z was offered in the winter, which was a great way to have another psychology class through the lens of data analysis.
Being so excited for the challenge of the course, I still did not know what to expect. The class met from 10 am until 3 pm, Monday through Friday. What I enjoyed was that the class was self-paced. For example, if you didn’t complete a mini-assignment that was due for that day, you could complete it the next day as long as you understood the material. Another enjoyable aspect of the course was the choice of a subject of interest to collect data from. I wanted to bring all my military experience to the table. As a class, we used the R program to analyze data collection from 5 different surveys. The subject of interest for me was the relationship between military service and depression. The original idea was to see the link between the military and suicide after military service. There was not enough data to compare the two.
