Tuesday, February 1, 2011

A little self-confidence….


Not that I really struggle with that issue on a daily basis. At least not on the things most people (or perhaps only women?) do. I don’t think I’m fat, ugly, too tall or too short. Sometimes I wish my stomach was flatter than it is, but really, I am a confident person in my looks. Same with my attitude. I feel I make friends pretty easily and even though I don’t invest the time to have a ton of friends around me at all times…that’s been more a personal choice than a character flaw (though the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). Self-confidence issues need not apply at my door. Humility is more difficult…

However, that is only for regular, day-to-day issues. Sometimes, I do doubt the validity of my opinion and nearly always believe that someone else probably has a better handle on the situation than me.  I’m an excellent bluffer, but if I don’t know the ins and outs of something, I have a real hard time owning it and making in mine in a discussion. Thus, we have meandered over to math. 

I am terrible at math. I try to learn, and study and fail over and over and over again. One summer, I took only a math class, I devoted 2-3 hours a night to homework, turned everything in, took notes, paid attention, stayed after class and worked with a tutor. I thought perhaps I just wasn’t applying myself previously. I needed this class to graduate with my Geographic Information Systems certificate. I had all the other classes but this one towards the requirement so I WORKED. I couldn’t fail, the stakes were too high!

And I failed. 

No certificate for me. I effectively attended college an entire extra semester to have it mean precisely nothing. It’s a rare occasion in life where my full energy devoted towards a project doesn’t get me what I want, but this was such a case. 

So you can imagine how nervous I was to learn that for my MBA, I needed not one, but two statistics classes. 

You can also understand my procrastination of such subjects to the very end. 

You can even probably empathize when I tell you I had a full-scale panic attack when I realized the professor who was teaching my statistics THIS semester was the same one who nearly killed me with homework in my macroeconomics class LAST semester. 

In a word, I have felt doomed for a while thinking about Spring and Summer 2011. 

But over the past 2 weeks something curious has happened. I, falling upon the homework like a Roman soldier who has been disgraced falls upon his sword, have worked with an air of futility. Each problem I figured out was happenstance, each answer correct was luck. 

Until it began to be a bit of a pattern. 

I was doing math. Statistics really, which make a surprising amount of sense. 

Not only that, but I was getting the vast majority of answers correct!

My confidence started blooming. Last night, as I finished up another 10 problems I actually somewhat enjoyed the work. And THEN imagine my surprise when I discovered I was supposed to be using some software which would do most of the hard work for me!!!

Heavens. It’s just too good to be true. 

I really think it’s due to the nature of statistics. I’m  not having to deal with theories or many equations, I am just applying common sense to a lot of data. But I also wouldn’t chalk it all up to that. Somewhere along the way I actually think I’ve become a little more analytical, have a tendency to see problems in different ways than I used to and have learned not to just throw down the pencil the instant a few numbers cross my page. 

And that, as they say, is good news indeed.

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