Something happy

...for a change.

Last week, one of my colleagues asked me if I'd be willing to serve on the thesis committee of one of his advisees. (We don't get release time for grad students here, but that's ok, we don't get many grad students, and the ones we get are usually a pleasure to work with).

I said yeah, because I had the time, and also I knew the guy and it will make me happy to see him finish up.

He was in my class the very first semester I taught. I remember him pretty well because he did well at the start of the semester, started to tank (and miss class) midsemester. He came in about 2/3 of the way through the semester to apologize. He explained he'd been diagnosed with OCD and was taking meds and therapy to control it, but he was having some difficulties. I told him not to worry - he was, at that point, still pulling a passing grade. With some help from me, and a lot of hard work on his part, he got caught up, and, IIRC, wound up with a high B.

He graduated the next year and got a job with a state agency.

Well, now he's working part-time on a Master's degree. And he needed someone who knew stats.

So we met yesterday.

I like doing stats "counseling" for people. It's something I'm good at, and I'm not ashamed to say that. It's one of those weird, savant-like things: I always walk in nervous, wondering if I will be able to suggest the appropriate tests, but when I sit down and talk to the person about their data, 90% of the time it's like it becomes perfectly clear - like I can "see" the structure of the data and how they need to be analyzed to answer the question the person's trying to answer.

And there's also a little bit of pleasure in the sense of making-order-out-of-chaos: having someone come to me with a big mess of data tables and having me say, well, you probably want to extract this column and that column and compare them using a t test, or whatever.

His data are pretty straightforward. I suggested the two or three tests that would be most appropriate depending on what part of the data set he was using. And I set him up on one of the campus computers and quickly showed him how to enter and analyze the data.

And that's another pleasure of teaching: showing someone once how to do something, and then stepping back, and having him go, "Oh, this isn't so hard after all! I get it!"

He came by today to tell me he had the analyses done. And to ask if a sub-analysis he wanted to do was valid to try (it was). He kind of laughed and said it was a great relief to finally have started on his data analysis (I remember that feeling - it's not been so long since I was a grad student myself). And he said to me: "You have no idea...you just totally made my day yesterday."

And THAT is why I do it. I made one person's life a little better, I got someone a little further down the road to where they needed to be. Even if the rest of this week is for crap, at least I did one good thing.

And sometimes, doing "one good thing" is about all we can hope for in a week.