On Statistics and Business

Last night I had my first statistics class--ever. Growing up in a house with two professional statisticians, the words "statistical reasoning," "probability," and "measurement" were not entirely foreign to my ears, though until last night I had no idea how little I actually knew about what statistics is. Practical, actually, and perhaps even immediately useful. As we talked about "descriptive statistics" and "inferential statistics," playing around with pivot charts that neatly arranged and measured an entire data set into a smart little chart, I realized that this tool may be exactly what I need to solve an ongoing problem of sorting and displaying data on crisis calls at my part time job.

To demonstrate these topics, my professor, a sprightly grey-haired man who is clearly overwhelmed with his excitement of sharing his knowledge of statistics with us, projects a data set on the screen for us to analyze together. The data in question describes the performance of hundreds of mutual funds over a period of five years. We look first at the data in tabular form, then as a class we are walked through the steps of turning this data set into a histogram, with only a few swift moves in Microsoft Excel.




On the computer screen in front of me, I am confronted with an image that is supposedly "describing" the data to me. The "y-axis" clearly represents the frequency (how often a certain value occurred) but the "x-axis" puzzles me. It is labeled something like "maximum class values" and shows numbers ranging from -5 to 5. Hating to be left in the dark for a moment, I raise my hand and ask the professor to explain the meaning of the x-axis. He launches into a discussion of "bins" and grouping entries so that that not every item is displayed, but instead a group of close values, spaced at regular intervals. I realize quickly that it is not the statistical concept that is throwing me, but instead the content of the business example. What in the hell does the "performance of mutual funds" mean anyway?

Judging from the data at hand, it seems that the business world has come up with some sort of point system for describing the "performance" of these funds. From my brief foray into the business world to date, I have already gleaned that "mutual funds" refers to a kind of investment where a person invests their money into a group of stocks instead of just one, and then someone manages those investments, making sure to move them if a certain stock starts losing money. This is supposedly a safer way to play the stock market. But what are these performance points based on? And more importantly, why does it seem that:

1. We are already supposed to know all this stuff
2. Everyone else knows it already
3. And I have no clue what any of it means?

Looking around me at my peers, I have an overwhelming desire to go back in time and complete my B.A. in something practical, something that would help me right now. Something like finance. Or marketing. Several of the students in my program seem to have graduated with Bachelors in related topics such as these, and are now entirely comfortable with the business terminology we are assumed to understand. For a minute I am lost in wistfulness, realizing how far along I would be if I had majored in accounting, how easy it would be to get a job, and how easy business school would be now.

As I walk out of the classroom and head home for the night, my head is still spinning around the endless number of things that could have been. I think back to my undergraduate career--pursuing a bachelor's in Women's Studies at small, Quaker, Earlham College. It was at Earlham, in those classes, that I truly began to question the ways of the world, and envision alternate systems that could be in place. It was at Earlham, that I stayed up with peers, talking late into the night about creating a world that would be just and fair and honest. In these discussions we referenced the feminist activists and academics we studied, along with radical scholars and critical thinkers we learned about in sociology, philosophy, and our other liberal arts classes.

Those visions and criticisms that I developed at Earlham College, in my Women's Studies classes and in the radical community I was a part of, are what started me on my path of working to make a better world. Along this path I found my way to Portland, to In Other Words, and now, finally to business school, always challenging myself to stay true to my vision of working towards something better. Remembering all this, I decide that I am okay with where I am at, and wonder, who in the world I would be, if I had taken any other path.