As a Biology major I am required to take an introductory statistics course during my undergraduate career. Personally I took AP Statistics senior year of high school and was able to test out of introductory statistics, so have not taken statistics for three years. Although I do not remember everything from statistics, I do recall main concepts that I have been able to apply to biology courses. One main takeaway from statistics I have been able to apply daily is creating and interpreting graphs. In statistics I grew in my skills in building and studying axes and graphical components. We learned how to create line graphs, bar graph, histograms, box plots, and more. We also learned how to create data sets and lists. Using these graphs and data sets we were able to compare mathematical data, and find correlations between different factors. We also learned that “correlation does not imply causation” when comparing data. In my current ecology course, we interpret data sets and graphs everyday, and apply these graphs to patterns in population dynamics and interactions between species.
Aside from conceptual skills, I have been able to apply mathematical skills including chi square analysis and standard deviation. Chi square test for independence is used to determine if there is a significant association between two variables in biology. We used this in my genetics course to accept or reject hypotheses regarding gene linkage. Standard deviation is used to tell how measurements for a group are spread out from the average. We used this concept in basic math courses and calculus, as well as in our biology lab to see how far our observational results differed from the expected values.
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