How did I end up as a statistician?

This question sneaks its way into my thoughts nearly every day — dressed in many different outfits. A reasonable answer is far bigger a single blog post and realistically depends on the day. But, starting somewhere feels important. Much of my life’s story is wrapped up in my career as a statistician — like it or not.

When people ask the “What do you do?” question and I answer “I’m a statistician” — it has always evoked a confusing set of emotions for me. I feel proud to have earned a master’s and PhD in Statistics, I feel my love of research and science, I like the feeling that most people are surprised and can’t relate to it … but underlying a surface of positive feelings is a sense of dread. Dread that I kept hidden for so many years — a voice saying “yeah, I’m a statistician, but I loath most parts of it and have no idea how to navigate my feelings around it or communicate them in an effective way — even to myself.” I was stuck.

To be clear, I do not loath the statistician profession in general. I think it is incredibly important and valuable to science — I just have been unable to find a comfortable seat for myself within it. It’s like all the chairs were made for people much taller, shorter, wider, and narrower than myself. This is not a new feeling. In retrospect, it started 21 years ago, before I even started studying Statistics for the sake of Statistics. I was a graduate student in another discipline — simply trying to figure out how we should and shouldn’t rely on statistical inference for the science I was trying so hard to learn how to do.

I now find it very ironic that the discomfort I felt about how I was being taught to rely on statistical methods is what pushed me out of that science to study Statistics. I thought that was my way out of the discomfort — to face it head on and get to the point I understood it so deeply that I would feel comfortable using it and my work would be helping others navigate that discomfort. I would come to Statistics from science and a passion for research — a very different path from that of students with mathematics degrees who seek to pair it with a more practical degree for the sake of future jobs. There were times when I became so focused on statistical theory and my classes (not really connected to doing science in other disciplines) that the discomfort lessened — but every time I leaned back into Science, there is was again. The more knowledge I gained, the more the discomfort morphed and grew. The gut feeling of discomfort became a discomfort I could attach reasons to — and over time I realized my naive gut feeling had actually been too mild, rather than too exaggerated. Over the next 20 years, it grew in intensity and form — from a feeling akin to annoyance to an almost unbearable weight. A weight that led me to daily tears, extreme stress, and ultimately to a career crisis. The very reason for pursuing my career was also killing it.

I struggled to effectively communicate to others what was happening to me. No one seemed to get it at the level I was feeling it. I mostly got variations on — “Yeah, everyone has parts of their job they don’t like — it’s just life” — and came away feeling like a negative complainer that I didn’t want to be. I had held other jobs that definitely had their downsides — like cleaning human toilets and cow stalls — but they didn’t make me feel like I was feeling about being a statistician. The first time I felt I successfully communicated the feeling to someone else was with this explanation: imagine that to do your job each day requires you to bend far enough away from your professional ethics comfort zone that it causes you real pain. I finally realized that part of my problem was accepting that it is okay for me to have a different comfort zone than others — that understanding my boundaries and staying within them does not need to be interpreted as a negative reflection on others. I worried that my saying it out loud would be taken as if I was judging the locations of the comfort zones of others, but I am completely comfortable with different scientists having different comfort zones– it is a positive because it pushes all of us to self reflect and justify our stances. What was not positive, was for me to hide the boundaries of my own zone and to feel pressured to work outside of them to get paid. And I guess that’s why I find myself here — writing a blog and a book proposal and not getting paid (yet!?).

Many stories of middle aged career changes stem from a lack of meaning and passion for the work one is doing. This is the story people assumed I was telling — but that isn’t my story. I am passionate about understanding statistical inference and how we can use it in science — I just cannot sit comfortably with much of current practice. I don’t want to leave my career as a statistician behind — I want to use my 20 years to morph it beyond a practicing statistician to facilitating needed discussions about how and why we are using statistical methods and results.

I thought I could do it as a practicing applied statistician, but I have finally accepted that that option is untenable to me personally. I can now say it openly — and I cannot adequately describe the relief that comes with that. I will no longer attempt to walk the impossible line between holding true to my understandings and beliefs and playing the arbitrary games almost required to succeed in current scientific culture. I could not find a balance that left me feeling whole at the end of the day.

I still want to be a statistician. I still am a statistician. I want to engage with scientists — not to help you with your statistical analysis under a set of arbitrary and misguided rules about how it should be done– but to use my expertise and experiences to motivate and facilitate discussion about how we are, and could be, relying on statistical inference to support science.